AngularJS Versions: What’s New In The Latest Version

Hi guys! If you are faced with the question of which version of AngularJS to start studying it, or what are their differences and their features in general, then you have found the right article. Here you will find out about some of the versions of AngularJS, their characteristics, release dates and what’s new in the latest one. Let’s move on!

AngularJS was created by Misko Hevery. He built a framework to deal with the defects of HTML, while also taking advantage of library ideas and best practices that anyone never created before. The first version of the framework was launched in 2009. This made the foundations for modern front-end application development.

AngularJS has been one of the best one-page application development solutions. Later it became widespread and earned popularity among developers. In other words, this is a ready-made set of functions written in JavaScript. This is a kind of grid on which your web site will be built in the future. This is all done according to the MVC template. That is, model-view-controller. A view is a framework for displaying information, a controller is what processes data and connects everything in our application, like its brains and a model is all application’s databases, some kind of files.

The user receives information from the view and sends it to the controller when he somehow interacts with the site or application. Thanks to the use of the MVC template and other features provided by the framework, applications written in AngularJS have a number of advantages. Any application consists of a large number of loosely coupled blocks that are connected together with the help of dependency injection and various techniques and present ready-made working solutions. This makes it easy to add some new functionality without affecting an existing one and a working project. Because of this, applications are becoming more maintainable.

Angular also supports testing. But this is more related to the MVC template than to the framework itself. Any project built using the MVC template will support testing. Angular maintains standards. When working with it, you will apply all the features of web development.

How about new versions and updates? Misko Hevery (founder of AngularJS) who works in Google continues to develop and maintain the library with other Google employees. What do they say about the development of new versions and their productivity? For example between 1.3.12 and 1.3.13 there can be no breaking changes. We do allow breaking changes to happen between “minor” number changes.

But between 1.3.15 and 1.4.0 there are a number of breaking changes. That means AngularJS does not follow semantic versioning where breaking changes are only allowed when the “major” version changes. Such changes are trying to minimize. Instead, functions are constantly improved, code is greatly simplified, and performance is significantly improved.

If the user is hesitant to upgrade to the latest version of the framework, he can quickly see it in the change log. It contains all the important changes that are described and highlighted. There are also “patch” versions that make available features with non-breaking changes. Some outdated features may also be in updated versions, but sometimes they need to be specifically activated.

The latest stable version of AngularJS at the moment is 1.7.9, released in November 2019. The Angular team has developed this version with significant benefits. Namely: long term support and exclusive bug fixes. The good news is that the framework is entering a three-year support period that ends in 2021! Long-term support came along with some exclusive bug fixes and performance improvements.

It also has several new features for main and external modules, and some obsolete modules and APIs have been removed. This version will make it much easier to update your Angular project, no matter how big it or small. On June 4, 2020, the Angular team released an even newer version – 1.8.0. This version is not stable and so far most developers use the previous one, which has already been described. It is better to try these updates yourself and decide which version of AngularJS to use.

Conclusion

The Angular team which is based in the Google office shares the desire of users to update and wants to improve framework’s performance, make significant changes and facilitate coding. Accordingly, new versions are released and developers are actively testing them. In this article, I described some of the latest versions of the framework and explained the main features. But only the AngularJS developer should decide whether to update the program and for what purpose. Hope it was interesting for you. Happy coding!