Angular 17: Revolutionizing Front-End Development with a Paradigm Shift

As an outstanding front-end development framework, the newest version of Angular v17, which introduces a paradigm shift, is announced. It covers such features as server-side rendering, faster and scalable app development, built-in control flows, and many more features that help Angular developers build applications with enhanced effectiveness and security. Angular version 17 sets new standards for the best app performance and also helps boost the developer experience.

This latest version in Angular Development offers up to 85% faster run-time with the use of loops of control flows in the public benchmarks. It allows the build of advanced features and functionalities for the app’s fresh look, and many more features have come up with Angular v17.

There is a new block template syntax is build which offers the robust features to with simplicity and declarative APIs for the amazing developer experience. For the built-in control-flow, new block syntax is optimized for quicker app development. It helps authoring and management of the conditional logics. Angular primarily uses directives for control flow in templates. Directives are special tokens in the mark-up that tell Angular to do something to a DOM element. The most common directives for control flow in Angular v17 are ngIf, ngFor, and ngSwitch.

Built-in for loop is the most crucial feature in Angular v17, which is at the top of developers’ choice. It helps improve the developer experience and pushes the rendering speed of Angular.js to the next level.

The basic syntax for the Built-in for loop in Angular v17 is as follows –
@for (user of users; track user.id) {
{{ user.name }}
} @empty {
Empty list of users
}

Angular primarily uses TypeScript and supports features available in TypeScript for creating loops and iterating over data structures. The ngFor directive is commonly used for looping through arrays or objects in Angular templates.

The Angular v17 provides the support for Server Side Rendering or the SSR. Now developers can use ng new to start development of any new project. A -ssr option is now accessible for all developers for app development.

To activate SSR later, add the @angular/ssr package and use the following code:

ng add @angular/SSR

This package comes from the Angular team, as @angular scope makes clear. A call to ng not only serves server-side rendering but also opens a development server that supplies the bundles that are required for browser functionalities.

Deferred loading, also known as lazy loading, is a technique used in Angular 17 new features to load modules or components on demand rather than loading everything at the initial application development. This fantastic feature significantly improves the initial load time of your application, as only the necessary parts are loaded when required or, in the case of route changes, it seems more sophisticated. Conditional loading, standalone dependencies, and integration with loading blocks are some of the characteristics of deferred loading in Angular v17. The defer function can be used in the app development process according to the requirement, and it works differently under all conditions.

The signals were added as a substitute state management and change detection technique in the Angular.js version 16. In the newest version of Angular.js 17, alerts become stable while other signal-related features are still in work. Signal-based components are one of the examples of Signal-related features.

An example of a stable signal in Angular v17 is as follows:

const input = signal(1);
const rеsult = computеd(() => input() + 5); // rеsult would now yiеld 6
input.sеt(2);
// rеsult would now yiеld 7

Standalone components are now the default for the latest generated Angular development projects made using ng new in the Angular.js version 17. However, developers can still make use of NgModules by default when creating projects by the execution of syntax:

ng nеw <projеct-namе> –standalonе falsе.

Generally, Angular developers can use NgModules and standalone components together in the same project development using the Angular.

Angular CLI (Command-line Interface) is used to generate bundles using Webpack. Angular 17 features came up with the latest and most stable version of CLI for Angular project development with the application builder.

With the use of this feature, developers can move projects to ESBuild directly by updating the angular.json file with the code given below:

“builder” : “@angular-devkit/build-angular:browser-esbuild”

If you are using Angular v16 and want to migrate your project to Angular JS v17, the following steps help in angular project migration:

1. Update the Angular Command-Line Interface or CLI using the ng command.
2. Update your Angular.js packages. The command ‘ng update’ updates the Angular version to the new version of Angular v17.
3. Check for breaking changes, as the minor release of the version can cause several breaking changes to the Angular projects. It is essential to identify and address those breaking changes.
4. It is required to ensure that the third-party dependencies and libraries used in Angular 16 are compatible with Angular 17.
5. After the change in the programming, test and ensure that your application is as fully functioning as you desired in Angular 17.
6. After migrating the version of Angular, take advantage of performance optimization and look for the implementation of new features for better application performance.