From AngularJS to Angular

The initial release of AngularJS was on October 20, 2010. The framework nowadays is used in millions of applications around the world. AngularJS got so popular that numerous technologies were inspired by it and even started using it as a foundation.

One such platform for development of mobile applications is Ionic. Over time, the framework was constantly evolving, trying to provide an API as ergonomic and simplistic API as possible while still being powerful and expressive enough to help us develop complex web applications with ease. The API changes between versions were small and usually introduced through a deprecation process. This way, we: as developers: have enough time to go through the transition process and align to the latest changes.

In the meantime, however, the web evolved, and tens of new technologies got created, some of which directly impacted AngularJS itself or gave the framework opportunities for big jumps in terms of performance or ergonomics. Such new APIs were introduced, for example, by the web worker standard, or even new languages such as TypeScript.

This way, although AngularJS was the optimal technology for application development in 2010, it struggled to stay competitive and flawless, given the constantly moving web. This was the birth of the idea for a new framework, inspired by AngularJS, but with more powerful APIs and better performance! Because of the conceptual similarities with AngularJS, Google called this new framework Angular.