Ng-News 25/35: @for tracking strategies, Future of Angular at Angular Space

#angular #webdev #programming #javascript

No big releases this time, but lots of quality content: track tracking strategies demystified, Angular Digest launches, Michael Small dives into Signal Forms on Angular Space, and a new UI library lands.

📌 Tracking Strategies

Matthieu Riegler is a member of the Angular team and one of his main responsibilities is improving the documentation. According to Matthieu, many developers still misunderstand how track works inside the @for loop.

To address that, he (under his pseudonym Jean Meche) created an interactive demo showing how Angular manipulates the DOM based on different tracking strategies.

From personal experience, I can tell that efficient tracking becomes really important when you have lists with frequently changing elements.

In Matthieu’s example, objects are recreated in every interval cycle, meaning their references change constantly. That’s why tracking by object identity performs the worst in that example.

Tracking by $index works better in that case because Angular reuses DOM nodes and only updates property bindings.

The best-performing strategy in this example is tracking by a property (like id). Since 9 out of 10 elements have the same id as in the previous cycle, their DOM elements can be reused. The DOM elements just change positions. Even property binding does't happen.
Only the new one triggers a fresh DOM node.

That being said: tracking strategies depend on the use case. Otherwise, Angular wouldn't even need you to specify them. The best strategy is knowing how they work and applying the right one.

&commat;for tracking demo

jeanmeche.github.io

🚨 Nx Security Issue

Nx, the popular extension for Angular CLI, had a rough moment. Their deployment process was compromised and a malicious actor managed to publish harmful packages.

Not great - but what's important is how the team handled it. And in this case, they did very well. Nx published a detailed timeline of the breach. The malicious packages were live for roughly 4 hours before being fully removed.

So, if you're in Europe and installed Nx dependencies on a night shift between August 27th, 00:30 and 04:30 (CEST) — you may have been affected.

Head to the official report to see how to check and what to do. There’s also a support email provided for direct help.

Security Advisory: https://github.com/nrwl/nx/security/advisories/GHSA-cxm3-wv7p-598c

🎙️ Angular Space Podcast

Angular Space, a platform focused on Angular learning, had its first live podcast episode. Host Armen Vardanyan invited Michael Small to discuss the future of Angular.

As expected, it was all about Signals. Michael follows the Angular repo closely, so he shared lots of insights on the upcoming Signal Forms feature.

📬 Angular Digest Newsletter

A new Angular newsletter has launched. It’s called Angular Digest and it’s maintained by Gerome Grignon.

#1 Angular Digest - by Gerome Grignon - Angular Digest

Angular 20.2 was released two weeks ago, and 23 Angular community events are planned until the end of the year. Get to know what happened lately in the Angular ecosystem!

geromegrignon.substack.com