My FeedDiscussionsHeadless CMS
New
Sign in
Log inSign up
Learn more about Hashnode Headless CMSHashnode Headless CMS
Collaborate seamlessly with Hashnode Headless CMS for Enterprise.
Upgrade ✨Learn more
Angular 8 is Released! What’s New in It?

Angular 8 is Released! What’s New in It?

Nidhi Jaiswal's photo
Nidhi Jaiswal
·Sep 9, 2019

Earlier this year, on 23rd May 2019, AngularJS version 8 has been released in the market. Today, the AngularJS web development framework is arguably one of the most popular open-source options for impressive frontend development.

I am saying these based on the AngularJS usage statistics report globally. Let’s take a look at the report.

angularJS usage statistics.jpg Source: BuiltWith

As per the report by BuiltWith, today, worldwide 1,152,159 live websites are using AngularJS. Some of the popular websites that are using the Angular js web development framework are

  • Netflix

  • UpWork

  • PayPal

  • Lego

  • YouTube, etc.

If you want to look at the top industry verticals where AngularJS is being used, here it is.

angularjs industry verticals.jpg Source: SimilarTech

In this blog, I am going to highlight what new features and updates AngularJS version 8 is offering.

Angular 8.0 - What’s New in It?

This latest version has brought a bunch of performance and workflow improvements. Let’s dig a bit deeper into the Angular 8 feature list.

Differential Loading

Thanks to the differential loading feature that web applications built on Angular 8 will be now more performant. With this feature, while production building, two bundles are created. One bundle is for older browsers that support only the JavaScript ES5 version. And another bundle is for modern browsers that support ES2015+.

Now, the browser will automatically load the correct bundle. This is one of the major performance improvements offered by the new Angular 8.0. No need to do anything extra to avail benefits of differential loading. The below-mentioned command will take care of everything.

$ ng build --prod

Improvements in CLI Workflow

The CLI workflow is continuously improving. Now, ng run, ng test, and ng build are equipped to be extended by third-party tools and libraries. For instance, the AngularFire with a deploy command is already making use of these new capabilities.

Lazy Loading

This is based on the Angular Routing concept. It helps to bring down the large file size by lazily loading the required files.

In the earlier versions of AngularJS, the route configuration uses the property @loadChildren. It accepts a string. Previously, if there were any typos while writing the code or a wrong module name, Angular would not consider it as being wrong. And it would have accepted whatever value was there as a string until the AngularJS developers try building it.

To overcome this issue, in this latest version, support for dynamic imports in router configuration has been added.

Use of Builders API

With this newest Angular version, developers and experts can use Builders API. Builders are used for main operations like build, serve, lint, test, and e2e.

Bazel Support

Now, a certified AngularJS developer can easily build a CLI application with AngularJS version 8.0. The credit for this amazing functionality goes to Bazel, developed and used by none other than Google! The most interesting thing about Bazel is that this build tool can seamlessly work with almost any language input.

Other than all the above-mentioned features and updates, AngularJS version 8 has some more updates and features to offer. The list will remain incomplete without mentioning

  • Angular router backward compatibility

  • Dependency updates

  • Enhanced web worker bundling

  • Opt-in usage sharing

  • TypeScript 3.4 support

  • Improvements in AngularJS migration

  • Dart-sass for the Sass files, etc.

What about Ivy?

With this Angular 8 version, a preview of Ivy has been made available for testing. It is a new rendering engine to produce smaller bundle sizes. However, you should not start using it in production yet.

What do you think? Comment down below to get the discussion started.