Announced on November 8, 2023, by the core Angular development team, the latest release of Angular—Angular 17—was to mark 13 years from the release of that iconic red shield of Angular. Angular was living up to its schedule, with one major release every 6 months and 1- to 3- minor updates per each of these. Angular continued to be one of the biggest influences in the development community.
There were also other interesting features and updates, besides Angular 17, that were released in versions 17.1 and 17.2 later on. These new releases impressed the community because it was real that a team of Google developers, along with the support of the community and Angular development company, had outstripped the expectations of users from Angular 17. Let’s take a look at the new features of Angular 17.
What’s New in Angular 17 Features and Updates:
AngularJS was the first step towards the oncoming wave of JavaScript frameworks for the increasing need for rich web experiences. Though the development team did a great job on the Angular 16 version, with Angular 17, they have been setting new standards on performance and developer experience.
New Look and Feel:
Angular 17 comes with new branding and a logo while retiring the old red shield. It has a new website in beta, which brings back a lot of changes, including:
- A sandbox to play around and test new features
- The ability to record tutorials inside the sandbox
- Organized content by topic: components, forms, accessibilities, best practices, etc.
Angular Renaissance:
Angle Renaissance is a new event that will be showing ongoing updates. This includes signal-based reactivity, hydration, standalone components, and directive composition. The changes will keep Angular at a fast pace.
The current new Angular.dev site, which is still in beta, comes by default with Angular 18. It includes reworked documentation, new guides, improved content, and an interactive learning platform using WebContainers.
In-Built Control Flow:
Angular 17 has a native implementation of control flow, with a new block template syntax that will replace *ngIf, *ngFor, and ngSwitch. The new syntax is translated by the Angular compiler into an effective JavaScript instruction, and so this would give:
- Intuitive, JavaScript-like syntax
- Improved type-checking and narrowing
- Smaller runtime footprint and up to 30kb smaller bundles
- Enabled by default—no additive imports
New Declarative Control Flow:
Angular 17 comes with different handling of template structure involving the usage of keywords, among which are:
* Replaces *ngIf, *ngFor, and *ngSwitch directives
* Cleaner syntax
* Improves readability and code maintainability
* Intuitive template flow handling.
@for (product of products(); track product.id) {
<div class=”card”>
<h2 class=”card-title”>{{product.productName}}</h2>
[…]
</div>
}
@empty {
<p class=”text-lg”>No Products found!</p>
}
@for replaces *ngFor: It iterates over the function call products(), which presumably returns an array of products.
Track by product.id: For better performance, it keeps track of products with their unique ID.
The content inside @for: Appears to repeat for each product, probably showing details such as name {product.productName} inside a card structure.
Empty State: The @empty block handles the case that products() return no items.
No Products Found Message: Adds a message to this product list if empty, indicating no products were found.
Deferrable Views in Angular 17:
The deferrable view is a new capability within Angular 17, which defers the rendering of users of an application to a later stage when required, thereby improving both performance and the developer experience.
Declarative, assertive deferred loading makes it easier than earlier ways to lazy load by ViewContainerRef, which would guide complexities like cleanups, load errors, and placeholders. This improvement leads to cleaner, more maintainable code.
TypeScript 5.2 in Angular 17:
Angular 17 incorporates TypeScript 5.2, which has huge enhancements, particularly to the readability of code, and secure types, and extends the development experience. Hence, here are the major contributions of TypeScript 5.2 to the Angular 17:
Metadata Decorator Programming:
- Adds metadata, class behaviors, or functions for much more organized, structured, and reusable code.
- Allows for advanced functionality and customization.
- It is used primarily to improve efficiency with TypeScript compiler plugins or Angular components.
Module Augmentation:
Now, one can extend the existing modules with the new members and customize the code without changing the original code. The module augmentations are designed to extend the JavaScript objects such as arrays and custom methods. This also helps to write and organize the code per your development needs.
TypeScript 5.2 in Angular 17 supports the union of arrays, type inference, and type aliases. Another key feature introduced in this new feature was the support for better type checking of template array literals which allowed more power in decorator programming.
How to Upgrade Angular v16 to Angular v17:
Hire dedicated angular developer India for the update. The steps that aid in upgrading from Angular 16 to 17 are as follows:
Update the CLI Globally: Run npm install -g @angular/cli@17 to update the Angular CLI.
Project Directory: Go into the directory of your Angular project.
Run Update Command: Run ng update @angular/core @angular/cli. It will run the update of core packages.
Further Updates: Based on your setup, there could be more things that need updating. The official guide has all the details.
Conclusion:
Angular 17 is going to come out with many new features and improvements made to ensure even better performance and developer experience. If anything, the long list of updates already available in the pipeline is further continued evolution for Angular, promising new and exciting changes for application development.
If you’re a business owner looking to upgrade to the latest version, don’t hesitate to reach out to an AngularJS development company India like Tuvoc Technologies to get started today. Hire angular development services India now.
