Angular 6 Release
The new talk of the digital town is the release of Angular 6. As expected, it is an advance to its predecessor, Angular 5, and aims to counter its bugs. But, the advances of Angular 6 do not end there; it is packed with several new features and specifications that will definitely benefit the app development industry at large. Smaller, easier and faster is the motto on which Angular 6 functions. The new features of Angular 6 will be a dream come true for developers, as it will make their work a piece of cake. Angular 6 is standing true to its expectations as a Google Javascript framework for app development. Invariably, with its name attached to Google, it is not surprising that Angular betters itself with every version.
What’s new in Angular 6?
With every fresh version of Angular, technology enthusiasts scan through to find the latest additions. Angular 6 is no exception. With a number of new features to offer, Angular 6 is ready to set the world of app development rolling towards greater efficiency.
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Angular Elements
If you are a developer, at least once you would’ve wished to use Angular components in a non-angular ecosystem. Well, embrace yourself, Angular elements are here. Rob Wormald deserves all the credit for this advancement. Now you can easily employ angular components in other ecosystems. This is certainly the highlight of Angular 6 as now developers can create and publish an app in Angular 6 and use it over any HTML page. While this may seem to be just an incremental change for non-coders, but app developers will understand how remarkable this development really is.
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Deactivate a Service Worker
For developers, it is commonplace to test their final projects for the first time with a service worker. While it is a safe first step, before the official launch, service workers are particularly tricky to get rid of. Angular 6 comes to the rescue here. It comes with a safety worker.js file that can help you to unregister a service worker at your will. And the process to do so is incredibly simple. Just serve the content of the safety worker.js file at the URL of the service worker you wish to deactivate, and poof, it’s gone. If this hasn’t made you jump with excitement, are you really an enthusiastic developer?
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Ng add and ng update
As a user and a developer, a thought about the tedious process of updating an Angular app must have flown through your mind. Well, say hello to the new way to add and update libraries in Angular. Ng update allows you to update Angular apps with just a command. Additionally, the ability to hook 3rd party libraries into those commands optimizes the process of their updating as well. On similar lines, the complementary ng add feature will allow you to add and configure new libraries with a single command into an existing project. Let’s just say that Angular 6 is not only meeting our cloud touching expectations but also opening new avenues that were beyond our hopes.
Also Read: What is React Native? & Why React Native Apps are popular among startup?
Angular 6 Features
In the preceding discussion you saw, the major highlights that mark Angular 6 as different from its predecessors. The following text will take you a step closer to understanding what are the features of Angular 6 that are new, what improvements have been made to the existing ones, and how Angular 6 is likely to revolutionize app development for the ongoing year.
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Ivy Renderer
If you thought that Angular could not get any faster, step back and take a look. The Ivy renderer is a backward- compatible renderer that seeks to make the app smaller in size. An extended implication of size reduction is the faster compilation. The larger goal of instating this Ivy renderer is to cater to needs of speed improvements and increase in flexibility. How this will work is a no-brainer. The renderer will reduce the size of the code and as common knowledge says, shorter the codes, faster the compilation. Invariably, the faster compilation will entail speed improvements.
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Tree Shaking
Tree shaking is another step towards optimization. It seeks to prevent the transfer of any unused code into the final bundle. Ivy rendering and tree shaking together will embark on a new journey towards code optimization. Until now, the renderer directly passed the template data to the interpreter, which was expected to perform all the tasks. The presence of tree shaking will ensure that the renderer generates template instructions directly. Thus, this process will generate smaller code bundles and a consequential faster startup time.
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Space Optimization
Angular 6 is bent upon making speed improvements by making the codes shorter. Developers often find whitespaces one of the few parts of a code that take up unnecessary space. Technically, whitespaces take 7%-13% of a code. Reducing these whitespaces can go a long way to shortening the code and towards optimization. While the previous versions also had the option to remove the whitespaces, it was a manual process. Starting with Angular 6, removing whitespaces would be a default function. However, for all developers who still need whitespaces, using the following code should do the trick-
“angularCompilerOptions”: {“preserveWhitespaces”: true}
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RxJS6
Angular 6 comes with the latest version of RxJS (version 6.0.0). The latest version obviously comes with some captivating changes and additions. If you are a developer, you will be jumping with joy when we tell you that the changes will boost up the app performance and make debugging call stacks a piece of cake. In the same lines, the changes also bring about modularity improvements.
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Schematics
If you had a hard time till now is developing your custom templates, it’s time to cheer up. Angular 6 now uses a modern technology called schematics for web app development. Developers can use this technology for a variety of functions. To begin with, they can transform their projects in numerous ways. Firstly, you can create a new component, update a breaking code or even add new configuration options as you may require. Thus, schematics will invariably serve as a boon to developers. Right from augmenting the ease of use and development to fostering greater reusability of the codes, schematics in Angular 6 will bring about revolutionary developments.
Conclusion
It is a no-brainer that each subsequent development listed about as a new feature is aiming towards the same goal. The ultimate objective of Angular 6 is to endure speed improvements. The main route to speed acceleration is through reducing the size of the code which can then be compiled faster. With such new developments in hand, Angular 6 can easily optimize the app development process. Hence, it is a time for all developers to celebrate the release of Angular 6 with joy and excitement, as it will make their job a little easier.
