Angular - A Primer

When Sir Timothy Berners-Lee invented the Internet, he never anticipated that the Internet would be used to publish selfies, share cat videos, or bomb web page with ads. His main intention (guessing) was to create a web of documents so a user on the Internet can access these hypertexts from anywhere and make use of it.

An interesting article published by Craig Buckler at Sitepoint titled, The Web Runs Out of Disk Space (http://www.sitepoint.com/web-runs-disk-space/), shows how the content on the Internet is spread out:

• 28.65% pictures of cats
• 16.80% vain selfies
• 14.82% pointless social media chatter
• 12.73% inane vlogger videos
• 9.76% advertising/clickbait pages
• 8.70% scams and cons
• 4.79% articles soliciting spurious statistics
• 3.79% new JavaScript tools/libraries
• 0.76% documents for the betterment of human knowledge

You can see, since the invention of the Internet to the present day, how we have evolved. Better evolution needs better frameworks to build and manage such apps that need to be scalable, maintainable, and testable. This is where Angular stepped in back in 2010 to fill the gap and it has been evolving quite well since then.

We are going to start our journey by understanding the new changes to Angular, the importance of TypeScript, and see how Ionic 2 has adapted itself with Angular to help build performance-efficient and modern Mobile Hybrid apps.

In this chapter, we will take a quick peek at new topics added as part of Angular with the help of an example. The main changes that have taken place in Angular (2) are primarily on the lines of performance and componentization, apart from the language update. We will be going through the following topics in this chapter:

• What is new in Angular?
• TypeScript and Angular
• Building a Giphy app