By skipping the Angular 3 version, Google surprised everyone with the announcement of Angular 4, a latest advancement to mobile and desktop development JavaScript framework. This announcement evidenced, Google is more focused on improving the features of Angular rather than just increasing version numbers.
During the NG-BE 2016 Angular Conference held at Belgium, Igor Minar the Angular Team Lead at Google, already introduced Angular 4 version and demonstrated the schedule of future Angular version releases. At the conference he stated, Google will shift to Angular version 4 from the version 2, to associate the version 4 router with the upgrade.
Coming to what’s new in Angular 4, the most salient feature, it is slimmer and faster as compared to the previous versions. It is meant for the applications heavily dependent on animations where the core animation functions are transferred to a discrete package which can now be used separately. Considering this change, developers could easily look for the documentation and leverage the autocompletion.
In addition, the Ahead of Time (AoT) compilation is the major feature introduced in Angular 4 version. While in AoT mode, templates are compiled at runtime during the build and the JavaScript code is generated. AoT mode enables faster application to execution by generating extremely less amount of code, which as a result improves application performance irrespective of its size.
The entire framework is modified with TypeScript, a typed superset of JavaScript in which the Angular 4 version uses TypeScript 2.1. The new version of TypeScript offers amazing features to comply with the modern web ecosystem.
Also, a source map will be generated for the error cases within a template to facilitate relevant context considering the original template. Because of the downward compatibility, the Angular team disabled the TypeScripts strictNullchecks setting with the current release, as they need to work more on this particular feature.
Yes, by introducing the Angular 4 version, Google has taken a step towards the future. So have you already started planning your Angular 4 migration?
