Angular 12 Features: An Overview Of What’s New & Better

As businesses around the world continue to embrace digital transformation, there has been a growing focus on building mobile & web applications that facilitate this transition. While the market has an abundance of options to offer, there exist several frontend frameworks including Angular, React, Vue, and more to build solutions in a reliable & efficient way with fewer resources.

Angular is a leading TypeScript-based opens source framework for front-end application development from Google. This is highly preferred to build interactive, dynamic web & mobile apps. It has evolved drastically with every new version release.

If you’re also looking to develop, migrate or upgrade applications using Angular is your best choice. Though, it is essential to stay abreast of the latest trends in the market & what empowers developers to deliver desired results. Fascinated to know angular 12 new features? Then here’s a sneak peek at the interesting features packed in the new version and what will be discontinued & why.

The stable version of Google’s popular framework was released on September 30^th, 2021. Among different enhancements, the upgrade suggests taking down of View Engine assemblage and delivering the pipeline for the more current Ivy technology. Let’s discuss more on the other enhancements with this version.

Further, if you are looking to build a custom app for an enterprise or perhaps even a dynamic single-page app, then go to this blog a read to learn why Angular is the right choice for you.

One Step Closer to Ivy

• What’s new in angular 12 – the official announcement to take away the View Engine (Angular’s default renderer) is out and it will not be a part of any future releases to make Ivy Everywhere a reality.
• Described as the next-generation compilation and rendering pipeline, Ivy offers faster AOT (ahead of time) compilation.
• Existing libraries using the View Engine will continue to support Ivy applications. However, library authors are advised to start making the transition to Ivy.

Future of Protractor

• The has been in debate within the community to evaluate Protractor’s (end-to-end automated testing tool) future. As of the version 12 update, a decision has been made to avoid including it in forthcoming projects.
• Though, Cypress, WebdriverIO, and TestCafe are alternative open-source tools for test automation.

Switch from Legacy i18n Message IDs

• Multiple older message-id designs currently being utilized in the i18n framework are fragile. It comes with problems around whitespaces, ICU expressions & organizing format templates.
• The latest version has brought a more intuitive and canonical ID format that will reduce the invalidation and related retranslation cost in apps.

Neat Nullish Coalescing (??) is Here!

• This operator has been assisting developers to compose cleaner code in TypeScript classes for quite some time now.
• Angular 12 brings the power of nullish coalescing to templates. It is the coolest feature that makes the process of complex conditional statements easy and simple.
• This feature enables developers to set a default value to a variable other than Undefine or Null.

For instance,

{{age !== null && age !== undefined ? age : calculateAge() }}

With the use of new syntax turns into something much cleaner as follows:

{{ age ?? calculateAge() }}

Bidding Adieu to IE 11 Browser

• Being an evergreen platform, Angular stays acquainted with the progressing web ecosystem.
• As we are all aware of how Microsoft is removing Internet Explorer from its ecosystem for some time now. The open source framework is also inclined towards a similar direction of removing support for legacy browsers like IE.
• This version update reflects a new warning message for IE11 to discontinue support with the release of Angular 13 soon.

Stylish Improvements

• A few major stylistic enhancements are one of the best parts of this update.
• It now supports inline SaaS (Syntactically awesome style sheets) in styling fields and component decorators. This would now be possible without having to add any inlineStyleLanguage option to the angular.json file. In previous versions, software professionals could only avail SaaS from external mediums due to the constraints of the compiler.
• Much awaited support for Tailwind CSS also comes with this new version. Looking at the tremendous popularity of the Tailwind community, this is a smart move by the Angular team. Developers may begin by downloading the package from the npm package and then importing it into the project.

Easy Learning Curve Path

• Google always strives to improve the learning experience for developers. As a part of angular 12 latest features, some considerable changes have been made to the documentation.
• They have also updated the angular.io contributor’s content projection guide that will help developers improve their project documentation. One of the innovations that have come from the docs improvement is the inclusion of guides and videos section for error messages. This has been found extremely cool by the community.

Strict CLI Mode

• With Angular 12, Strict mode is enabled by default in the CLI. This assists developers to catch bugs earlier in the project development cycle.
• This mode improves maintainability and is simpler to statically examine applications. On top of it, the CLI mode can help the ng update command refactor code more securely and accurately when updating apps to the latest versions of Angular.

Default Production Build

• Running the ng build command had enhanced the development build. Now, in version 12, ng build will default to a production build to avoid accidental deployment of development builds.

This has been an overview of the Angular latest features that shipped with version 12.0. If you are using an older version, it’s time to update to the new version to avail of improved app performance.

Angular is a preferred choice to build robust web & mobile apps. With the arrival of v12, the development teams can help a pile of improvements to its performance, language service, compiler, form validation, and much more. The incorporation of the Ivy ecosystem is a certainly major enhancement. In addition to this, the new version would also feature improvement in styling, Nullish Coalescing, and shifting from Legacy i18n Message IDs as some other important features that make this release a stable one. On top of this, you can also expect a variety of bug fixes, affecting the compiler, core, router & more.

As the next phase in this journey, there are talks about ‘Zoneless Angular’ that would offer Zone.js choices and at last, offer more control to the development community. With the looks of it, the latest stable version is here to stay for a long time, however, we have our hopes high for what new next-gen development framework will surprise us within the coming days.

Now, all you have to do is start looking for a reputed and trusted software development services provider, like Rishabh Software to leverage the exceptional functionality of this nifty framework to the benefit of your business. As an experienced Angular development company, we build robust & secured feature-packed SPAs and highly dynamic frontend for web & mobile apps. Our highly qualified professionals are well-versed and updated with features to build enterprise-grade software solutions for small, medium & large-scale enterprises. With us, you can be rest assured to benefit from best-in-class angular application development services to create the most modern and interactive interfaces for mind-blowing applications.