The release of Angular 6 is around the corner, and in this blog, I’d like to highlight some of its new features announced by the Angular Team.

I started working with Angular when it was in its early alpha versions. Every new Alpha, Beta, and Release Candidate was full of breaking changes, and the announcement of each new release was giving me goosebumps.

After the official release of Angular 2 in September of 2016, the Angular Team started to care about us the developers from the trenches; new major releases come twice a year and switching from one release to another is an easy task. Angular is gaining popularity in the enterprise world leaps and bounds, and the Angular team continues improving this framework. To the best of my knowledge, these are the new and upcoming features:

Angular Elements. While Angular is a great choice for developing Single-Page Applications, creating a widget that can be added to any existing web page was not a simple task. The package called Angular Elements will allow you to create an Angular component and publish it as a Web Component, which can be used in any HTML page. Say there is an existing non-SPA app built using JavaScript and jQuery. The developers of this app will be able to use Web Components built in Angular in the pages of such an app. In our opinion, this killer feature will open many enterprise doors to the Angular framework.

Ivy renderer. This is a code name of a new renderer that will make the size of the app smaller and the compilation faster. The size of the Hello World app is only 3KB gzipped. The Angular Team promises that switching to Ivy rendered will be smooth, and I’ll take my hat off if they’ll be able to make it a non-breaking change.

Bazel and Closure Compiler. Bazel is a build system used for nearly all software built at Google, including their 300+ apps written in Angular. Closure Compiler is the bundling optimizer used to create JavaScript artifacts for nearly all Google web applications. The Closure Compiler consistently generates smaller bundles and does a better job in dead code elimination compared to Webpack and Rollup bundlers. In the upcoming releases of the Angular framework, you’ll be able to use this toolchain for building your apps as well.

Component Dev Kit (CDK). This package is already used by the Angular Material library, which offers 30+ UI components. What if you don’t want to use Angular Material but want to build your own library of UI components and control page layouts? CDK allows you to do this. It also supports Responsive Web Design layouts eliminating the need for using libraries like Flex Layout or learning CSS Grid. CDK was released in December of 2017, but the Angular Team keeps improving it.

Schematics and ng update. Angular CLI generates Angular artifacts using the technology called Schematics. If you decide to create your own templates and have Angular CLI use it, Schematics will help you with this. Staring from Angular CLI 1.7, you can use the ng update that automatically updates your project dependencies and makes automated version fixes. With Schematics, you’ll be able to create your own code transformations like ng update.

I’ looking forward to these features that will make Angular even better, but what else could be improved, that’s not on the roadmap yet? Angular CLI is a great tool, but it has lots and lots of dependencies on the third-party software. Over the last year, several times I’ve experienced broken builds in the latest releases of Angular CLI that were caused by some erroneous release of a third-party package.

The Angular CLI folks are pretty good at releasing patches when errors are reported, but the process of regression testing should be improved, so these errors wouldn’t even sneak in. I stopped using the ^ sign for the version of @angular/clip in package.json. I use the exact version that works for me unless I have a compelling reason for upgrade.

Go Angular!