The State of Angular and the Due Date of Version 5

High-level observation of the 4.x — 5.0 versions’ state

This article originally appeared on dormoshe.io

The Angular team at Google continue to publish new versions of Angular according to the Semantic Versioning. Version 2 was released on September 16. Angular version 4 was released on March 16, six month after version 2. In the last three months, two minor versions and a lot of patch versions were born with new stuff.

In this article, we will take a high-level overview of the 4.x.x versions, see the scheduling of the upcoming versions, discover the due date of the new Angular baby — Version 5, and we will review on two more surprises that are provided by Angular.

Version 4.0.0

The last major release is version 4.0.0 of the Angular platform. The release version is a major, because of the TypeScript upgrade from v1 to v2. The compliant to the new Typescript’s versions is viable in order to stay updated and get the new features and the last fixes.

Version 4 is smaller and faster than the previous. The Angular team built a new view engine that reduces the size of the generated code for components by around 60%. Another big change is the new Animation package. The code of the animations moved from the @angular/core package to @angular/platform-browser/animations. This optimizes the application bundle size.

A bunch of features and bug fixes was in the version. The prominent new features are the ngIf else syntax and the improved ngFor directive. Angular Universal and Angular-CLI are now part of the official Angular project. We can consume them by the new @angular/universal and @angular/cli packages.

The release schedule of 4.1.x-4.2.x and 4.3.0 beta/rc versions

Version 4.1.0

According to the semantic versioning, there are no breaking changes in the 4.x.x versions. The Angular code in version 4.0 built with v2.1 of Typescript. v4.1 adds full support for Typescript 2.2 & 2.3 and the Angular code built with v2.3. In addition, in v4.1 Angular is compliant with the [StrictNullChecks](https://basarat.gitbooks.io/typescript/docs/options/strictNullChecks.html) of Typescript.

The most part of the team’s work has been done on the official documentation website. This website is now an Angular-CLI application.

Version 4.2.0

A huge number of new features added for making animations easier and powerful. Part of them is the definition of reusable animations, querying for inner elements, animating when routes change and building/controlling an animation using AnimationBuilder. All of these are part of a new and a significant wave of animations features in Angular.

A New Wave of Animation Features in Angular - yearofmoo.com_Angular 4.2 introduces a wave of new animation features that allow for multi-element & reusable animations (with input…_www.yearofmoo.com

New test methods were added for a convenient programming: overrideProvider, whenRenderingDone and flush.

The **overrideProvider** method has been added to the TestBed in order to override a provider, without concentrating on how it defined and who declared the provider. This method is part the top goal of Angular’s team in the testing zone — to test AOT in JIT mode, in order to simulate the production environment.

The **whenRenderingDone** method has been added to the ComponentFixture. This function is similar to the whenStable method but focuses on waiting for the animations to be done.

The **flush** function helps us to automatically wait until all macro-task events, like timeout, have been cleared from the event queue. The tick(milliseconds) calls need to be replaced by this new function.

Other improvements have been done in a lot of zones in the Angular code like i18n, form validations, and templates.

Release schedule and version 5.0.0 🥂

The purpose of the release schedule is to assist coordination among the Angular team, Angular contributors, Angular application teams, and Angular community projects.

The release schedule of 4.3.x-5.0.0 versions

So, now we can say that the release of Angular’s version 5 will take place on September 18, 2017 😍🎉

The dates are just a guidance and might be adjusted slightly if necessary. In the release of version 2, the team succeeded to stick to the tentative schedule.

As you can see, there are 21 versions before the major release. One of them is minor — 4.3.0. The others are ten patch versions, seven betas, and three release candidate. March 2018 and September/October 2018 will be the months of versions 6 and 7.

Version 5 will contain a bunch of new features, improved processes, bug fixes and surprises. Making AOT the default, watch mode, type checking in templates, more flexible metadata, removing *.ngfactory.ts files, better error messages, smooth upgrades, tree-shakeable components and the hybrid upgrade application improvements are only parts of the amazing stuff that are going to assemble the next major version.

What to Expect for in Angular v5?_While we are busy on learning and exploring Angular v4, the Angular’s team is looking forward and planning the fifth…_hackernoon.com

More surprises

The new angular.io is now available

With the 4.2 version, the team also released a new angular.io website. The site’s infrastructure, architecture, and design have rebuilt using Angular under the hood. The site’s content and code examples are now hosted in the aio folder in the angular’s GitHub repository.

The new angular.io website

In order to improve the documentation, the team refactors the content and an “improve this doc” link will be added in the future for each page. The team believes that the public contributors can suggest a new stuff in order to improve the documentation.

The site was built with a service-worker in order to improve the performance in the desktop and mobile. The vision is to make the site a good example of an Angular application that implements the best practices and the progressive web app method.

Choosing of site/content version via the menu

In addition, the menu of the site contains a button to choose which version you prefer to use. Right now, the 4.2.2 is the new and v2 is the old site.

Angular Mix—Orlando @ October 2017

Another surprise that Angular provides us is the AngularMix conference. The AngularMix conference aims to provide the perfect mix of Angular, Open Source and Enterprise software development. This conference will take place in the first time at October 10–12, 2017 in Orlando, Florida. Workshops will occur in the 8th, 9th and 13th of October.

AngularMix — a new formal Angular conference

Some of the speakers will be the most popular and famous developers, including the Angular core team members. The core team will present the conference keynote as well as several sessions. The cost is between 1500$ to 2700$ including the workshops.

This new conference joins to the poll of Angular conferences and meetups that the community and key companies like Google have been supporting.

Tour to My Favorite JavaScript Conferences Stack_The JavaScript zone is overflowed with hundreds of conferences that take place all over the world. These conferences…_hackernoon.com

Conclusion

The last three month have been containing a lot of new things. The Angular team is working every time on new features and improvements that make us happy. “You can build with us!” is the Angular team’s overall message to the developer community this year. We can say that this slogan is what they successfully do. Now, we know what is the schedule for version 5 and what is the due date, so we can pin it in our calendars 📅.

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