⭐Angular 16 Features ⭐

Hey there,

I know I am a little late at this point. Also It has been a long since I have posted something here. So here it goes.

Version 16.0.0 is here and it has some great updates for Angular developers everywhere. 🎉🎉

TL;DR 🙌

✅ New reactivity model

✅ Angular Signals

✅ Server-side rendering and hydration

✅ Improved tooling for standalone components, directives, and pipes

✅ Advancing developer tooling

✅ Improving Developer Experience

How to update to version 16

Visit update.angular.io for detailed information and guidance. To have the best update experience,

Update to 16

ng update @angular/cli @angular/core

In order to update your global angular,

npm i -g @angular/cli

What’s in this release?

✅ New reactivity model

• As part of the v16 release Angular team share a developer preview of a brand new reactivity model for Angular which brings significant improvements to performance and developer experience
• It’s entirely backward compatible and interoperable with the current system, and enables:
  • Better run time performance by reducing the number of computations during change detection.
  • Brings a simpler mental model for reactivity

👉 Signals

• The Angular signals library allows you to define reactive values and express dependencies between them.
• A signal is a value with explicit change semantics.
• In Angular a signal is represented by a zero argument getter function returning the current signal value:
• Signals are fundamentally read-only: we can ask for the current value and observe change notification.

@Component({
  selector: 'my-app',
  standalone: true,
  template: `
    {{ fullName() }} <button (click)="setName('John')">Click</button>
  `,
})
export class App {
  firstName = signal('Jane');
  lastName = signal('Doe');
  fullName = computed(() => `${this.firstName()} ${this.lastName()}`);

  constructor() {
    effect(() => console.log('Name changed:', this.fullName()));
  }

  setName(newName: string) {
    this.firstName.set(newName);
  }
}

• The snippet above creates a computed value fullName, which depends on the signals firstName and lastName.
• We also declare an effect, which callback will execute every time we change the value of any of the signals it reads — in this case fullName, which means it transitively also depends on firstName and lastName.
• When we set the value of firstName to ”John”, the browser will log into the console:

"Name changed: John Doe"

✅ Server-side rendering and hydration

• In the new full app non-destructive hydration, Angular no longer re-renders the application from scratch.
• Instead, the framework looks up existing DOM nodes while building internal data structures and attaches event listeners to those nodes.
• Features
  • No content flickering on a page for end users
  • Better Web Core Vitals in certain scenarios
  • Future-proof architecture that enables fine-grained code loading with primitives
  • Easy integration with existing apps
  • Incremental adoption of hydration with the ngSkipHydration attribute in templates for components performing manual DOM manipulation

• Non-destructive hydration is still at the developer preview stage.
• But you can enable it by adding provideClientHydration() as a provider when bootstrapping the application.

import {
 bootstrapApplication,
 provideClientHydration,
} from '@angular/platform-browser';

...

bootstrapApplication(RootCmp, {
 providers: [provideClientHydration()]
});

• You can find more details on how it works in the documentation right here 👉 Hydration.

✅ Improved tooling for standalone components, directives, and pipes

• Angular 14 started supporting standalone components, which are independent of modules.
• Angular 16 takes this to the next level by supporting standalone project creation.

ng new --standalone

• You’ll get a simpler project output without any NgModules.
• Additionally, all the generators in the project will produce standalone directives, components, and pipes!
• Zone.js can be configured with the new bootstrapApplication API.

bootstrapApplication(App, {
  providers: [provideZoneChangeDetection({ eventCoalescing: true })]
});

✅ Advancing developer tooling

👉 Developer preview of the esbuild-based build system

• In ng serve angular now using Vite for the development server, and esbuild powers both development and production builds
• Angular CLI relies on Vite exclusively as a development server.
• To support selector matching, the Angular compiler needs to maintain a dependency graph between components which requires a different compilation model than Vite.
• You can give Vite + esbuild a try by updating your angular.json:

...
"architect": {
  "build": {                     /* Add the esbuild suffix  */
    "builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:browser-esbuild",
...

👉 Better unit testing with Jest and Web Test Runner

• Jest is one of the most loved testing frameworks and test runners.
• Experimental Jest support is added with Angular 16.

• Planning to move all the existing Karma projects to Web Test Runner in future updates.

• You can experiment with Jest in new projects by installing Jest with
  
  npm install jest --save-dev
  
  and updating your angular.json file
  

{
  "projects": {
    "my-app": {
      "architect": {
        "test": {
          "builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:jest",
          "options": {
            "tsConfig": "tsconfig.spec.json",
            "polyfills": ["zone.js", "zone.js/testing"]
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

More unit testing strategies can be found right here 👉 Blog Post

👉 Autocomplete imports in templates

• The language service now allows auto-import components and pipes.
• In v16 TypeScript 5.0 support is added, with support for ECMAScript decorators , removing the overhead of ngcc , adding support for service workers and app shell in standalone apps, expanding CSP support in the CLI

✅ Improving Developer Experience

👉 Required inputs

• In Angular 16, you can now define input values as required.
• You can either use the @Input decorator or the @Component decorator inputs array to define one.

@Component(...)
export class App {
  @Input({ required: true }) title: string = '';
}

Passing router data as component inputs

• Now you can pass the following data to a routing component’s inputs
  • Route data — resolvers and data properties
  • Path parameters
  • Query parameters *

const routes = [
  {
    path: 'about',
    loadComponent: import('./about'),
    resolve: { contact: () => getContact() }
  }
];

@Component(...)
export class About {
  // The value of "contact" is passed to the contact input
  @Input() contact?: string;
}

• You can enable this feature by using withComponentInputBinding as part of the provideRouter.

👉 CSP support for inline-styles

• The ngCspNonce attribute is useful if you have access to server-side templating that can add the nonce both to the header and the index.html when constructing the response.

<html>
<body>
  <app ngCspNonce="{% nonce %}"></app>  
</body>
</html>

👉 Self-closing tags

• A highly requested feature we recently implemented allows you to use self-closing tags for components in Angular templates

<super-duper-long-component-name [prop]="someVar"/>

For more let us hear it from the creators

Credits : Official Announcement 😄

Changelog : Repository