ng-whoa! Top 3 takeaways from ng-conf Day 1

ng-whoa! ng-conf, Day 1

Yesterday was a pretty amazing lead up to the first official day of the conference. It certainly didn’t disappoint, what with all surprises the organizers put into place.

However, today everyone was pretty eager to hear the opening talk from Brad Green and Igor Minar about both the current state of Angular and more importantly the future of the framework that we have all come to know and love.

It’s no secret that after ng-europe a lot of people were totally freaking out had some concerns about what they were hearing with regards to Angular 2.0

The Angular team could have dismissed the criticism and pushed forward, but the message they put forward today shows they really do listen and care about what the community of developers think.

1.) Angular 1.X is not dead

The big news here was that the Angular team is in no way abandoning the 1.X branch to simply die on the vine. There are currently over 2000 internal applications at Google written in Angular, so they are keenly aware of the vested interest that many companies and developers have made into Angular, and they are firmly committed to providing a strong migration strategy from the 1.X branch to 2.0.

AngularProjectsGoogle

Because of this they plan to begin porting the first internal Angular 1.X project over to Angular 2.0, and then use what they learn to make the transition smoother for the rest of us.

One of the biggest components to help make that transition as seamless as possible is going to be…

The New Angular Router

You may have heard that the new Angular 2.0 router was being back-ported to Angular 1.4. Not too long ago, Brian Ford announced that the new router is now in beta and is going to be ready when 1.4 is finally released.

How is this going to make the transition to 2.0 easier?

Well, it turns out that because of how the new router is built, it will allow you to begin changing out pieces of your application to 2.0 without having to migrate the entire thing. Effectively you will be able to run Angular 1.X and 2.0 within the same application, without resorting to ugly hacks.

You can check out the presentation for more information.

Angular 1.5 and the bridge to the future

Another aspect of migration is that starting with the Angular 1.5 branch, the team is going to begin building the bridge to the future, and will slowly begin incorporating pieces of Angular 2.0 into the 1.X branch. In some cases they will even be sharing entire modules, so applications that are keeping up with new releases will be slowly moving toward 2.0 regardless.

2.) Angular 2.0 is now in Alpha

One of the chief complaints about Angular 2.0 was that it was some kind of top secret project, and that the team wasn’t being open about what they were doing.

The truth is, that everything has been about as public as you can possibly get. Every design meeting and document is out on Google Docs, and the code has all been out on GitHub for anybody to go look at.

However, there wasn’t one single place you could go to and find all of that information. You couldn’t do an npm install angular2 and start hacking away… at least not until today!

Brad announced angular.io which is the new home for Angular 2.0 documentation. There is even a quick start guide which you can run through and create your first “Hello World” project with. And of course now there really is an npm package you can pull down and use.

AngularIO

3.) R.I.P. AtScript… Long Live TypeScript!

The Angular team has spoken a few times about their collaboration with the TypeScript team at Microsoft, but in probably the biggest announcement of the day, they announced that they were formally going to retire AtScript.

Why?

Because the good parts of AtScript, mainly the annotations, are going to be incorporated into TypeScript, and Angular 2.0 will be written in TypeScript moving forward.

This is a crazy announcement, and really shows that the Angular team cares a lot about just making the web a better platform for everyone. They are willing to take great ideas from anyone… even a competitor like Microsoft.

A rising tide lifts all boats.

Marching Forward

There were obviously a lot of other really awesome things that happened today, and too many great talks to begin to mention here. If you haven’t already, you should go watch the recordings and see for yourself.

As for me… I’ve already started hacking on the Angular 2.0 bits and I’m looking forward to start sharing what I learn with the community.

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