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<h2>A brief Angular 4 History
So far, three major Angular versions have been released – Angular v1.x (a.k.a AngularJS), Angular 2 and the newly released Angular 4 (also known as Angular). AngularJS has had a few major releases of its own with v1.1, v1.2 and so on, but let us stick with v1.x for all purposes of discussion.
Angular v1.x and v2 are quite different in terms of architecture.
While Angular v1.x (also known as AngularJS) was based on an MVC architecture, Angular 2 is based on a component/services architecture. Considering Angular was moving from MV* (Model View Whatever) pattern to components focused approach, the framework features were very different from each other and caused many application developers to rewrite a major portion of their code base.
However, Angular v2 to v4 is a very different story. It is a rather progressive enhancement. A majority of changes are non-breaking.
Angular 4 was released on 23rd March ’17.
What happened to Angular v3?
MonoRepo: Angular 2 has been a single repository, with individual packages downloadable through npm with the @angular/package-name convention. For example @angular/core, @angular/http, @angular/router so on.
Considering this approach, it was important to have a consistent version numbering among various packages. Hence, the Angular team skipped a major version 3. It was to keep up the framework with Angular Router’s version. Doing so will help avoid confusions with certain parts of the framework on version 4, while the others on version 3.
Angular 4 Enhancements
Consider the following enhancements in Angular v4,
- This release has considerable improvements in bundle size. Some have reported up to 60% reduction in Angular bundles’ file size
- The ngc, AOT compiler for Angular and TypeScript is much faster
- Angular 4 is compatible with TypeScript’s newer versions 2.1 and 2.2. TypeScript release helps with better type checking and enhanced IDE features for Visual Studio Code. The changes helped the IDE detect missing imports, removing unused declarations, unintentionally missing “this” operator etc.
This article and the code sample demonstrates an Angular 4 application using TypeScript and Bootstrap 4. Please note that Bootstrap 4 is an alpha release at the time of writing this article.
