This post was written by Alex Ivanovs, an online entrepreneur who focuses on markets like web development, web design and small business. His portfolio consists of several high profile online magazines that are now used as daily resources amongst the developer community, one such magazine is CodeCondo — a fast-growing learning resource for developers and designers.
AngularJS is the leading application development framework. Nowadays, web development is a challenge for any developer and these challenges can be overcome by providing the right tools and technologies.
One such tool is AngularJS. This web application framework was created in 2009 as a side project by the two developers Misko Hevery and Adam Abrons and later spun their original GetAngular project named as AngularJS within Google. AngularJS is a “superheroic JavaScript framework” – allowing web designers to interact with frontend and backend of the application, definitely a next generation end-to-end tool.
Typically in web development, we write everything inside JavaScript and then create a bunch of templates to generate UI. AngularJS allows developers to write a lot of code in HTML, and HTML accelerates the assembly of the application. Let’s see few reasons why one should prefer to use AngularJS framework for web development.
MVC got closer to MVVM
The majority of the frameworks implement MVC. It lets you split your app into MVC components and later you need to join them together; that requires a lot of effort on the developers end and opens up space for code errors. However, AngularJS manages the components and asks you to split your app into the components. AngularJS acts as the middleware and you do not need to rewrite and reshape the codes.
Customized Directives
AngularJS brings additional functionality to HTML via directives, imaging that HTML is so rich and strong that we do not have to manipulate DOM. Directives are standalone, can work in parallel, and offers swift development.
Ex: Directives can be:
Custom HTML elements: <angular></angular>
Custom attributes: <div data-myticker></div>
Custom class names: <div class=”myticker”></div>
Code Less
Code less and get more is what AngualrJS gives to its developers. This includes MVC pipeline management, HTML managed view, data binding is smooth, and data models can be written without getters/setters function. As discussed above, directives are separate from the application code and can be written by other teams in parallel with running into integration issues. Less coding helps developers to track all the modules in a systematic manner and the entire development cycle leads to a smaller financial budgets.
Flexible Filters
An autonomous feature (like directives) that involves into the transformation of meaningful data before it reaches the view, filters clean the data and do it as simple as formatting decimal places. Based on some parameters it filters an array, pagination, and reversing the order of an array. Filters are so rich that even a sortable HTML table can be created without even writing any JavaScript code.
Testing made easy
Application testing needs a lot of attention to various loopholes that are generated in real time scenarios. Writing tests is easier in AngularJS as compared to any other JavaScript framework. AngularJS includes dependency injection and two-way data binding, the code is easy to reuse, for example: directives, easy to test, effortless to maintain and free from the boilerplate.
In dependency injection, all the dependencies are given as parameters to the modules which makes unit testing incredibly simple. The team of AngularJS has made it compulsory that all the code blocks written in JavaScript will need to come with a series of tests. The team has designed AngularJS keeping testability in mind, which makes testing AngularJS applications easier. AngularJS comes with end-to-end and a unit test runner setup; which scans the complete code. For any framework/language or tool, documentation and learning materials won’t be sufficient to describe its capability and detailed functionalities. To uncover all, one will always need to deep dive by using it.
Interpretive User Interface
HTML is a declarative language which provides ease to developers and is more intuitive and less complicated as compared to defining the procedural interface in JavaScript. HTML is also less fragile to reorganize than a template written in JavaScript, thereby things are less likely to break. AngularJS enables adapting and extending HTML, which makes web application development and testing of those applications easier. AngularJS helps developers to create flexible and interactive web applications in no time. HTML provides more intuitive and easy to manipulate structured User Interface and developers can easily create flexible and interactive web applications.
Single Page Applications made smooth
The benefits of single page applications are becoming more and more popular across the globe. More functionality is being moved to the web, this approach amazingly contributes to the responsive design. Single page applications provide an experience that feels almost like a native app in web apps. These applications even help in reduce the server load by rendering on the client as well as it reduces network traffic – sending a payload of data and turning it into markup at the client instead of sending a full page of markup.
Whether you already knew about Angular and just wanted to see more reasons to continue working on it, or if you’re starting for the first time, I have an easy “next step” for you to learn more. Just head over to my Learn AngularJS by building projects course and get royalty free apps to build money making websites with the course. Feel free to leave a comment below to let us know of some more exciting features of AngularJS.