Angular 2 Vs Angular 4
The year 2015-2017 saw a host of new frameworks from the house of JavaScript. Though several of their offerings were unsuccessful to make a resounding impact, Angular and React survived the test of time to become the go to frameworks for successful Angular development. With several frameworks have made headway in the world of application development, Angular has found a special place as one of the best open-source JavaScript frameworks.
This article focusses on the basic comparison between Angular2 and Angular4 and whether or not it is good enough to make a switch. First, let us explore in detail the various features and highlights of Angular2 to be able to make a practical comparison with its successor.
ANGULAR-2
The Angular version two was primarily aimed at the development of mobile applications allowing developers to create a cross platform environment for their applications. The key highlight of Angular 2 was the removal of various supplementary modules from Angular’s core which simplified the process thus improving the performance. The supplementary modules have now found their way to Angular’s ever-growing library of modules where the users can effectively choose and select the components they want while leaving out the redundant components.
Angular 2 was specifically aimed at ES6 and “evergreen” modern browsers. The advantageous point of these browsers is that these automatically update to the most recent version. While developing for these browsers, Angular 2 provides various hacks and workarounds that allow the developers greater freedom build their code. Angular 2 eliminates several limitations that existed previously.
ANGULAR 2: FEATURES AND PERFORMANCE
Angular 2 was developed on AtScript, which is a superset of ES6. Traceur compiler combined with ES6 was employed to process Angular that enables it to generate ES5 code. It utilizes TypeScript syntax to create runtime type assertions instead of compiling time tests. However, it is not compulsory to use AtScript to compose Angular apps. The user can alternatively use plain JavaScript or ES5 to attain effective results. Let us explore deeper into the various key features of Angular 2.
RENEWED DEPENDENCY INJECTION (DI)
Dependency Injection was one of the important factors that set Angular apart from its primary competitors. Dependency Injection refers to a program design pattern where a specific program commendably gets hold of its dependencies instead of producing them. Dependency Injection is very helpful in cases of modular development and element isolation. Despite that DI has also faced several obstacles since the era of Angular 1.x. Angular 2 finally came with the answers to the problems along with some of the missing features such as child injectors and lifetime/scope control.
ANNOTATION
One of the major advantages of Atscript is that it supplies useful tools that can help functionally link metadata. This eases out the process of building the object instances by supplying the essential material into the DI library. The information entered will check for the relevant metadata when a function is called, or a class instance is created. A developer can also easily override the parameter information by hitting the “Inject” annotation.
CHILD INJECTORS
A child injector has the privileges such that it inherits all the functionalities possessed by its parent injectors, but it also comes with a capacity to override them at the child level. This capability provided by Angular 2 gives the developer a free hand to call out and mechanically override several components under a variety of scopes as the situation would demand.
ANGULAR4
Even though Angular 2 was a significant improvement from its predecessors, Angular 4 takes it forward with some new features and improved capabilities.
Let us study one by one how Angular 4 has secured itself an edge over Angular 2 and how AngularJS development organizations can leverage it.
FASTER AND COMPACT
Angular 4 applications are smaller as they consume less space and run faster than its older versions. The team working behind Angular are constantly making developments on a regular basis to iron out the inconsequential technical glitches that may exist.
SIGNIFICANT VIEW ENGINE IMPROVEMENT
Angular 4 series have come up with several changes which also include several view engine twists to diminish the size of the generated code for various components by as much as 60 percent. This update version has claimed to reduce huge production bundles to mere kilobytes.
ENHANCED *NGIF AND *NGFOR
One of the main features that Angular boasts of are an improved template binding syntax. The improvement of the *ngIf and *ngFor comes after significant criticism for the lack of the “else” and “if-then-else” clause. Developers can employ an if/else design syntax, or introduce local variables such as “if” to unroll an observable.
THE VERDICT
Angular has come a long way since Angular 1.x to reach the version that prevails today. This evolution of Angular is expected to continue to bring in more revolutionary features to make the development team’s job easier. Even though Angular can be slight challenging to adapt at first, but those who are familiar with the functioning of Angular 2, will find it simpler to adopt Angular 4.