Angular: Why you should consider this front-end framework for your company
A fear for every team is choosing a tool that will quickly become obsolete. If you've been developing applications for a few years, you've probably already experienced this. Therefore, choosing good tools is a task that involves responsibility, as it can guide the project (and the company) to success or to a sea of problems and expenses. In this article, we will understand the uses and benefits of the Angular framework.
Choosing a front-end framework is no different and also involves research and studies. Choosing a “stack”, as we call it in this world, is trivial both for the present and for the future. However, some questions will arise in the midst of this choice:
- Will we find qualified professionals to deal with this framework?
- Will we be able to maintain a pace of updates?
- Is there a well-defined plan for the direction the framework is going?
- Is there a community (we also mean large companies supporting it here) engaged?
All of these questions must be answered before starting any project, as neglecting a screen can lead to devastating scenarios for the product, and consequently for the company and its profits.
Motivations for using a framework
Perhaps the most direct answer is that sometimes it's good not to reinvent the wheel. Routine problems such as dealing with routes in a web application, or even controlling dependencies, generating the bundle optimized for publication in production, all of these tasks already have good solutions developed, and, therefore, choosing a framework that gives you this set of tools is perfect for gaining productivity, solidity in the development of an application and also keeping it always updated by following best practices.
As well as the direct motivations, I can also mention:
- The ease of finding tools that integrate with the framework
- The search for quality software, integrated with tests and other tools that will make the development process mature
- Many situations and problems have already been resolved (because there are a lot of people working with technology)
Motivations for using the Angular framework:
- Built using Typescript, one of the most popular languages at the moment
- MVC architecture
- Dependency Control and Injection
- Modularization (with lazy load option)
- Good libraries for integration
- Large and engaged community
- 1835 contributors in the official repository
- Officially supported and maintained by the Google team
The solidity of Angular
Currently, we can clearly state that the framework is stable, receiving frequent updates due to its open-source nature. This is because it is maintained by the Google team, which always seeks to make the The roadmap of what is to come as clear as possible, which is very good. Furthermore, the Angular community is very active and engaged. It's difficult to have a problem that hasn't already been resolved.
One of the concerns of every developer is regarding drastic changes to a tool. Anyone who lived through the change from V1 to V2 of Angular knows this pain, the change was practically total. However, the framework was correctly based on Typescript, which brought robustness and another reason for its adoption: with Typescript, we have possibilities that Javascript alone cannot solve: strong typing, integration with the IDE, making life easier for developers , error recognition at development time, and much more.
Currently, the framework is in version 17 and has been gaining more and more maturity and solidity, with the increase of innovative features such as defer recently launched.
Easy upgrade
The framework provides a guideline for every upgrade through the website https://update.angular.io, this feature helps a lot in guiding your project update.
Full CLI
Angular is a framework. Therefore, when installing your package we will have the CLI ready to launch new projects, generate components, run tests, generate the final package and maintain updates for your application:
To create your first project, simply open your terminal and run the following command:
Solid interface designs
If you need a design for your application that provides ready-to-use components such as alerts, modal windows, snackbar warnings, tables, cards, one of the most popular possibilities is choosing the Angular Material, a good point to follow your software with it is because it is maintained by Google, so whenever the framework advances in version, Material usually follows this update.
In addition to Material, there are other options in the community, such as PrimeNG, which brings a very interesting (and large) set of components.
Nx library support
Angular has full project support Nx, which makes it possible to scale your project in a very consistent way, mainly guaranteeing caching and advanced possibilities for you to maintain and scale your local application or in your CI environment.
Here are some specific examples of how Nx can be used to improve an Angular project:
- You can create an Angular library that can be reused across multiple projects.
- You can create a monorepo that contains all your Angular projects, which makes cross-team collaboration easier.
- You can automate common development tasks like running tests and deploying your projects.
Tests (unitary and E2E)
In addition to Karma and Protactor that were born with the framework, you are now free to use popular projects like Jest, Vitest and Cypress.
State with Redux
One of the libraries most used by the community is the NgRx Store, which provides reactive state management for Redux-inspired Angular applications.
Brazilian GDEs
In Brazil we currently have two Angular GDEs, which is important for our country and also for generating Angular content in Portuguese, bringing always updated news and insights to our community directly from the Google team.
Large companies using and supporting
Perhaps the most notorious is Google, the official maintainer of the framework. The company has several products built using Angular and in recent years has been further supporting the development and evolution of the tool.
An important point when choosing a framework is knowing which large companies are using it, because it gives us a signal that that tool will have support for updates and evolution since no one likes to keep rewriting products from scratch, here I will mention some global companies that use it Angular in your products, websites, web services:
- Firebase
- Microsoft
- Mercedes Benz
- Santander
- Dell
- Siemens
- Epic
- Blizzard's
On the national scene we also have examples of large companies using the framework successfully, we can mention a few:
- Unimed
- Cocoa Show
- Americans
- Checklist Fácil (Easy Checklist)
- picpay
Want to know more?
Interested in starting with Angular? Access https://angular.dev/, the newest documentation for the framework that features tutorials, a playground and good, well-explained documentation.
Good code!
