We’re going to nail our colors to the mast here: there has never been a better time for Angular development than in 2022.

With recent, future-facing new updates (and plenty more lying enticingly on the horizon), a full range of components, and great mobile portability, Angular is the frontend development framework for 2022, and beyond.

Here’s a bit of background on this frontend powerhouse, and five top reasons why Angular development is a strong addition to your frontend development toolkit right now.

What is Angular?

Angular is one of the best frontend development frameworks out there for large-scale projects that other tools, like React, can’t quite handle.

As a development framework, it cuts down  on the amount of from-scratch coding your developers need to do by offering a bundle of prebuilt components, libraries, APIs, and other tools. Ultimately, you get to market quicker, your devs can reinvest saved time in other projects and everyone’s a winner.

Angular development is all done in TypeScript, a JavaScript superset that offers some nifty additional features, all the while being 100% deployable where regular old JS would be. These include:

• Optional static typing, classes and interfaces
• Better tooling options
• More robust builds, particularly at a large scale

Where should it sit in your frontend development toolkit?

Angular works best when you’re going big. We’re talking complex business logic for high-performing web apps, with a hefty feature-set, one-way binding and fantastic testing libraries.

Case study: check out our work with Best Egg for an idea of what Angular can build

Is Angular Development Still Relevant in 2022?

We work in an industry in which tech is progressing at lightning speed, and Angular has been on the scene a while. So it’s, perhaps, entirely natural to wonder about Angular’s long-term viability as a development tool.

We’re 100% in Camp Angular here. Not only is Angular a useful tool right now, but is also a great bet for long-term stability and success.

Why?

Firstly, the numbers don’t lie. The most recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey puts Angular as the fourth most popular web development framework overall. When looking at frontend development frameworks only, Angular is the second most popular behind React.

That’s not all though.

The team behind Angular has consistently shown a drive to improve and futureproof the framework, with releases every six months. The latest release – Angular 13 – offers some genuinely next-level improvements, and they’re not slowing down. Angular 14 and beyond looks to be just as innovative.

Sound exciting? More below…

5 Reasons to Consider Angular Development in 2022

1. Everything in one package

Unlike React, its main competitor in the frontend development tool stakes, Angular is a completely fully featured frontend development framework rather than an extended JS library.

This means the main Angular vs React difference is that you’ll need to rely on a host of third-party applications. These include:

• Redux: a containerization tool that speeds React up in large apps, assists with rendering and manages components in applications with dynamic elements
• Babel: a transcompiler tool which converts React’s JSX to regular JS for browsers
• Webpack: a code bundler for better component management
• React Router: the standard library for routing in React
• A range of testing and debugging tools

This is great for builds where you need a high level of customizability or flexibility, but less useful when the specific configuration of these elements isn’t central to your project.

As a fully-featured framework, Angular offers all of this functionality one umbrella. For urgent or time-sensitive projects, this is an absolute godsend as it eliminates time spent on configuration. In Angular, it’s all there out of the box, ready to use.

2. Angular Development Works With Complex Business Logic

There’s a reason Angular is the frontend development tool of choice for larger enterprises.

Angular provides reliable structure and scaffolding for web apps, and contains everything you need to build kick-ass web apps from the ground up. This makes it a great fit for:

• Apps with complex business logic, where a large feature-set, one-way binding and extensive testing libraries really come into their own
• Larger teams or applications, where a rigid structure makes everything easier to maintain and manage.

If you need an enterprise-level dynamic web app – especially a single-page or progressive web apps, Angular is a great solution.

3. Angular is Now 100% Ivy

The latest Angular release shifts everything about the framework onto Ivy, Angular’s next-gen rendering and compilation engine and ends support for its predecessor, View. To get technical for a minute, this means:

• You can compile components independently of each other
• You benefit from the engine’s ‘tree shaking’ features

‘Tree shaking’ involves the compilation engine figuring out exactly which libraries you need based on your code base and eliminating any unused code. Meanwhile independent component compilation means that you only need to recompile components that have changed, rather than the whole application.

The result is a significantly improved development time due to faster code compilation, whilst your finished app loads quicker thanks to tree shaking.

Angular 13 offers plenty of other features that decrease development time whilst giving your apps a performance boost, including:

• Major Testbed improvements, with DOM cleaned after every test
• Inline support for Adobe fonts
• Dynamic code for APIs, rather than boilerplate
• Persistent build-cache toggled on by default, for a 68% reduction in build speed

4. Angular Development Offers Strong Mobile Portability

If you want your TypeScript code to run across mobile operating systems, you’ll need to use cross-platform mobile development framework NativeScript.

This allows you to share 90% of your code across iOS and Android and port the business logic from your web apps into a mobile setting. You create a single user interface for all mobile operating systems, and make adjustments where needed.

The great thing about NativeScript is that it doesn’t use Webview rendering to do this. Instead, it runs the app in JS virtual machines, which connect directly to native mobile APIs. What this gets you is a mobile app that emulates the look and feel of a native app.

Obviously, it’s not quite there – nothing compares to building a truly native app from the ground up. Equally, it gets pretty darn close, and the time savings NativeScript offers make it a tempting proposition indeed.

5. Material Design Components

Material design language was developed by Google to help designers follow the set of UX best practices Google has been developing. It helps build intuitive interfaces with a familiar ‘feel’ to them, based on Google user interfaces.

It’s based on three key principles:

• Objects on screens behaving as in real life. Tiles should have shadows, for example
• Being bold and intentional. Choose colors and headers that stand out and avoid clutter
• Using motion to convey meaning. For example, if you press and hold on an Android icon it pops out a little to tell you it’s moved.

Material Design Language is extremely popular for both web and mobile apps because it taps into a well-recognized visual language that inspires trust among users. This means it’s super useful that Angular offers pre-built material design components straight out of the box, including:

• Common interaction patterns
• Form controls, navigation,
• Layouts
• Buttons and indicators
• Pop-ups and modules
• Data tables

If your UX designers are big on material design, having these components immediately available for use time and again will save you loads of time when it comes to developing your prototypes.

6. Impressive, Future-Facing Update Cycle

Angular issues updates every six months. The Angular lifecycle is around 18 months – this is when they stop supporting older updates. On a basic level, it means that security flaws are fixed quicker, and hackers have less time to exploit them before an entirely new update comes along.

It also means that you get access to new features quickly. Angular tends to phase these in over numerous releases – you won’t get the rug immediately pulled out from under you, but if you’re a keen early adopter there’s the option to take advantage.

For example, the Ivy compilation engine was first released on Angular 8 as an opt-in feature.  Support for its predecessor, View, was only pulled completely on the recent Angular 13 release.

And, after the evolutionary Angular 13 release, there’s already a lot of anticipation for what Angular 14 has in store! Nothing’s confirmed yet, but micro frontend support, strictly typed reactive forms, independent components from modules, and more might be just around the corner.

Angular’s Great, But…

There’s always a ‘but’, isn’t there?

With exciting new features, continued commitment to innovation and the efficiency gains it offers, Angular development services are increasingly in demand. This means competition for developers has never been higher.

For some businesses, investing time in finding the perfect in-house hires or training your existing JS devs to use TypeScript is absolutely worthwhile in the long term. Equally, you won’t get immediate results.

If in-housing your frontend development isn’t strategically important to you, or you need to get your app to market ASAP, why not consider outsourcing to a development agency like Tivix?

We offer:

• Immediate access to a talented global network of Angular developers
• A decade’s worth of experience in Angular web development projects
• A range of other services, including UX design, backend development and data engineering, to make your project a success

Get in touch today – we’d love to learn all about your project and what you hope to build!