10 Major Features Introduced in Angular 4

Web Application Development is supplying spontaneous, interactive, and clean applications with the help of extraordinary and magical features of Angular.

The angular community has included many advanced features to Angular 4 and that’s why the major version number has moved to Angular 4. The main reason behind skipping version 3 was that the router package was in version 3.x, so instead of putting everything to 3.0 and the router to 4.0, the team chose to upgrade the versions of all the ng-modules to 4.0.

Let me tell you some important news the angular community has decided on some time-based releases occurring in three different phases:

• Angular patches will be released every week

• Few minor releases will be followed by a major release

• At last, there will be a major release every 6 months

Now let’s jump into the 10 major features introduced in Angular 4:

1. Type Script 2.4

2. Angular Universal

3. StrictNullChecks

4. Module-ID Removed

5. Animation Package

6. Smaller & Faster Apps

7. Template ng-template

8. ngIf with else

9. Pipes

10. http

1. Type Script 2.4:

TypeScript is an open-source programming language created and maintained by Microsoft which is free to implement. It is a superset of JavaScript which primarily provides optional static typing, classes, and interfaces. Also designed for the development of large applications and trans compilers to JavaScript. Angular 4 introduced them and soon you will be able to activate the new strictNullChecks.

2. Angular Universal:

Server-side rendering is the act of spitting the same HTML content in virtual DOM to the server so that they are rendered appropriately by the browser on request. This allows spiders and web robots to dig your websites and index content when necessary.

Server-side rendering was not a thing in canonical Web Application Development until single-page apps came about. Such apps use a virtual DOM concept that abstracts DOM rendering. A technique is needed to render to DOM via server requests.

The project was maintained entirely outside Angular, but from Angular 4 forward, Universal will become a core Angular module.

3. StrictNullChecks:

Sadly, some parts of the improved Type Checks could not be included in Angular 4 [for now] because some incompatibilities were found in the RC phase. There are plans to include this feature in v4.1, though.

4. Module-ID Removed:

They added a new SystemJS plugin that manually writes module ID in angular 4.0, angular can take the path reference you should provide a relative path enough. It dynamically converts “component-relative” paths in template URL and style URLs to “absolute paths” for you.

5. Animation Package:

Upgrading the Angular 2 Animations now has their own package i.e. @angular/platform-browser/animations; now import statement will look like this instead:

 Import the BrowserAnimationsModule module in your app module: 

Animations now have their own package i.e. @angular/platform-browser/animations.

6. Smaller & Faster Apps:

The Angular team did a great job enhancing the speed. Angular 4 applications are smaller & faster in comparison with Angular 2.It has been noticeable when doing development, but I have not been able to test much of the difference on a live server.

7. Template ng-template:

Modify your code and change all occurrences of the template

<template>

to

<ng-template>

you should use the ng-template tag instead of as <template> caused conflicts with other usages of the <template> tag It still works, therefore the Angular team changed it to use <ng-template> for Angular purposes. It will pop a warning if you use the deprecated template somewhere when you update to Angular 4, so it will be easy to spot them. It’s a breaking change; therefore they didn’t introduce this change in Angular-2 but only in Angular-4 according to semantic versioning rules.

8. ngIf with else:

It’s now also possible to use an else syntax in your template.

9. Pipes:

Angular 4 introduced a new title case pipe. It changes the first letter of each word into uppercase.

10. http:

Adding search parameters to an HTTP request has been simplified.

Conclusion:

A few things to watch out for:

Updating to Angular v4 could mean that some of the dependent modules will be out of sync, so you have to update them as well. Personally, the only issue I had was TypeScript which I updated to 2.2.1.

Code editors and plugins that understand the Angular template syntax will still complain about improper syntax when you use the other keyword. This is fine because your code will still work. The plugin/editor managers will make updates as soon as they can.

I guess we have covered all the major changes introduced in Angular 4. Web Application development using Angular 4.0 will provide a more secure, flexible, and scalable pathway. It really shows the Angular Teams’ commitment to making Angular the best and most interactive and efficient for development.