The Angular development team today announced a major release to the mobile and desktop framework. Angular 5.0 focuses on making Angular “smaller, faster, and easier to use.”
The new release includes the new build optimizer that will run by default when production builds are created with the CLI. The tool is designed to make bundles smaller. “The build optimizer has two main jobs. First, we are able to mark parts of your application as pure,this improves the tree shaking provided by the existing tools, removing additional parts of your application that aren’t needed,” the team wrote in a post. “The second thing the build optimizer does is to remove Angular decorators from your application’s runtime code. Decorators are used by the compiler, and aren’t needed at runtime and can be removed. Each of these jobs decrease the size of your JavaScript bundles, and increase the boot speed of your application for your users.”
Angular 5.0 also enables users to share application state between server side and client side versions of the app with the Angular Universal State Transfer API and DOM support.
Angular Universal enables developers to perform server side rendering on their Angular apps.
The version’s ServerTransferStateModule and the corresponding BrowserTransferStateModule enable users to generate information about their rendering with platform-server and transfer it to the client side without having to regenerate the information. This is useful when users perform application fetches data over HTTP.
In addition, the release features compiler improvements to support incremental compilation, speed up rebuilds and ship smaller bundles. Some compiler improvements include TypeScript transforms, ability to preserve whitespace from components and applications, and improved decorator support.
Other features include new router lifecycle events, RxJS 5.5, updateOn Blur / Submit capabilities in Angular Forms, CLI v1.5, zone speed improvements, and a new HttpClient.
Information on how to update to version 5.0 is available here.
