As you’ve probably know by know, Angular 2 is out, and that got me interested in what they came up with in these 2+ years, and additionally, how much did they screw up.
The talk around Angular 2 was pretty controversial during its development, and it left a lot of people hanging because of all these clear cuts made in relation to Angular 1.

Meantime, there was this new kid on the block which was generating a lot of noise and doing some revolutionary things, especially in terms of performance and ease of development called React.

I was firmly in the React camp for the last year or so, and I knew it was the future. But what kept React back for me and probably most of the developers was all these unanswered questions: which build process to use, what data managing library, managing state, even which language to use (ES5, ES6, Typescript, Flow). There was also this story around mobile development which didn’t have the right answer: you could go React Native, which is great, but that’s a huge buy-in which doesn’t always really work-out for small and micro agencies and enterprise apps; Ionic is still king-of-the-hill when it comes to these types of apps, and React just doesn’t have a clear answer which goes well with Cordova.

But i feel that, after looking at some videos and trying out some code, Angular has exactly the right bases covered and it’s ready to put up a good fight for king of front-end hill.

I wrote a “vs” in the title, but it probably should state “inherits”. Angular2 is basically React, it inherits pretty much all of its best features (component tree, virtual dom, clear inputs and outputs) and builds upon it. Angular 2 adds all the infrastructure needed for building a complete web app (from data fetching to routers), with all the decisions premade, and it does so by using the most cutting edge language (TypeScript) and event management system (RxJs), and all the other batteries included. I’m so happy to see the adoption of these 2 technologies as a base for Angular, as both of these have been a favorite of mine for some time already. RxJs has a long history, I’ve used it even before it had a Javascript version, and it’s been one of the best secret weapons in any developer’s arsenal. Typescript was one of my biggest gripes against React, because although you could use Typescript with React, it was not a default choice. Even the very popular create-react-app CLI is not using it and it doesn’t plan to do it in the near future.

Even the inline templating (which a lot of people complain about) does have its merits, because it’s a place where some brilliant folks from angular enabled a thing called Template Transform, which effectively enables you to have your own DSL for showing and fetching data, and creating your own nicer and shorter syntax.

The state management has also been blatantly copied from React, and then supercharged. Some smart folks took the Redux patterns and then they combined them with RxJs to create something that Redux should’ve been from the start.

As for the ecosystem, although React’s gain in popularity was stellar, the big component producers have been suspiciously quiet on the front of native React components. They did make some wrappers, and some new component producers emerged, but “Kendo and co” didn’t give out much else than that. Angular 2 already has native controls BEFORE the initial release! Enthusiasm is huge, and plenty of 3rd party library developers are rallying behind it. Ionic 2 is also just around the corner if you want to build power efficient, mobile hybrid apps. And if you’re big on Native, there’s this thing called NativeScript which sports native Angular 2 support. Angular 2 was built with mobile in mind from the start, so we are very excited to give it a spin on our next project. Stay tuned for some demo apps and proof-of-concepts from us, but in the meanwhile, take a look at following videos to wet your appetite: