Why Angular

Angular faces stiff competition, specifically from technologies like React and Vue in regard to performance and features which reflects in their respective state of preference by global corporations and the dev community. Some of these aspects (not exclusively) in favor of Angular are mentioned as follows.

• DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)

  This is one of the key features which represent modern JavaScript front-end frameworks and libraries. In Angular, we can reuse the constituent building blocks of the UI to create complex web applications as opposed to creating the UI elements over and over again.

• Client-side rendering

  Though with the use of AJAX and jQuery, we could already update sections of the webpage without a reload. However, SPAs let you update the entire page which is rendered not on the server but the client (browser).

• Two-way Data Binding

  Unlike React and most of other JavaScript frameworks, Angular enables two-way data binding as part of its MVC architecture. This means that as soon as data changes, Angular updates and synchronizes the Model and View layer automatically. This process doesn’t require additional set-up from the part of developers, thereby reducing development time and costs.

• Based on TypeScript

  Angular is built upon TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript which transpiles back to JS. Being a strongly-typed language, it offers several more syntactical and debugging features (like autocompletion and navigation) in comparison to JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Dart, and other related languages. This helps developers write and maintain clean and understandable code in their Angular applications. Debugging is also greatly sorted for large-scale applications.

• Customization vs Automation

  The fact that Angular is a full-fledged framework handling all three layers of the application (Model, View and Controller) in contrast to React, which is just a library for dealing with the view layer, gives Angular an advanced edge. All tools and packages are standardized and automatically updated when building Angular applications so developers don’t have to worry about compatibility and maintenance issues of 3rd party libraries. Consistency is achieved across the code structure as there is a standardised way of creating and managing components, modules and packages. While this feature leaves developers with less choice of choosing custom libraries for handling different functions of the application, like we can do in React, this rigidity of the framework ensures better maintainability, automation and security features.

• Angular Material

  At par with Material Design, the popular design language endorsed by Google, Angular Material is a useful UI kit containing several reusable front-end components such as buttons, indicators, and form controls. These are ready-to-use, well-documented, cross-browser compatible and well-tested for use within any Angular application.