This is a special edition of ng-news where we look back at the most important Angular events that happened in 2022.
Angular Re-Invented
The year started with a small question mark. Igor Minor, who was at that time THE person of the Angular team, left, and it was unclear what impact that would have.
Around the same time, the results of the State of JavaScript Survey were published, and we saw that Angular ended in the lower ranks in terms of
popularity. But the results also showed that in terms of usage, Angular was in second place.
There was hope in the new standalone feature that was already announced in 2021. It would remove the necessity for NgModules and would, first of all, simplify Angular.
However, given Angular's historically-related caution when adding new features but not breaking anything and the amount of time it took to migrate to Ivy, there was some justified suspicion if Standalone Components could really make it into version 14.
Those with doubts, like me, were in for a surprise. Angular 14 landed with Standalone Components and Standalone APIs that replace NgModules coming from the framework itself. But that was not of all it.
Typed Forms, which brought type-safety to ReactiveForms, and an inject function that provided an alternative to the constructor-based dependency injection were also part of version 14.
We got even further features in the following minor versions. For example, in 14.2, we got the NgOptimizedImage directive. A "super-directive" with all sorts of features around performant image handling.
It almost looked like Angular was re-inventing itself.
Version 15 brought the Directive Composition API, made the standalone features production-ready, and therefore finished the standalone story.
Outlook for 2023
In the second half of 2022 we saw more and more signs that the Angular team does not just look what other frameworks are doing but also plans to integrate those modern features.
For example, we saw the rise of meta-frameworks. Hydration and the necessity that a framework provides native support to run on the server played a central role there. Some examples are the React Server Components in Next.js, Remix, Astro, and Qwik with Qwik City, which is so advanced that they don't even call it hydration anymore but resumability.
The Angular team is internally working on improving their hydration, and they might even come up with some kind of resumability.
Inspiration also comes from SolidJS, where Angular is thinking about adding more reactivity than it has nowadays.
There are also plans to remove zone.js and replace webpack with esbuild.
Lots of stuff to do, but given the pace we saw in 2022, I'm very optimistic that 2023 will be a very interesting year for Angular.
Personal Highlights
My personal highlights were in the area of testing. We saw that former E2E frameworks, especially Cypress, brought support for component testing. That was urgently needed because testing was too hard.
And of course the in-person meetups and conferences. It is completely different if you see somebody giving a talk live on stage or speaking to someone face-to-face.
All the best for 2023
Last but not least, I would also like to take the opportunity and thank you for watching, reading, sharing, liking, and commenting on ng-news. This is really a huge motivation for me to do this every week, so thanks again.
I wish you a Happy New Year and see you in 2023.
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