Last year was a great year for the Angular team in terms of community. The Angular community reached a million developers at the end of 2017, and is growing five times faster than AngularJS did, the company recently revealed. To keep up the momentum, the team has released its 2018 roadmap with a major focus on productivity.
The Angular 2018 roadmap includes: Bazel, Schematics, Component Dev Kit, Angular Elements, and Ivy Renderer.
“The Angular team values applications users love to use, applications developers love to build, and a community where everyone feels welcome,” Brad Green, Angular platform engineering director at Google, wrote in a post.
Bazel is a multi-language build tool Google has been using within the company for more than a decade, according to Green. The Angular team is working to offer Bazel as an option for its developers. Bazel features advanced local and distributed caching, dependency analysis, parallel execution, incremental builds, multiple language support, ability to scale to any size group and codebase, and ability to add support for new languages and platforms. Green explained that Bazel never redoes work that has already been done.
Schematics is a core technology inside of the Angular command line interface. The team plans to provide developers with a new Schematic-based feature in CLI v1.7. The new feature will be designed to automatically update project dependencies and make automated version fixes, Green explained. “With Schematics, you don’t have to wait for the CLI team to come up with features and you can build your own code transformations,” he wrote.
The team recently announced its first stable release of the Component Development Kit (CDK). CDK is designed to provide core functions as well as enable developers to create custom functions.
Angular Elements aims to give developers the ability to publish Angular components as web components and use them anywhere, according to Green. The capability is still in development.
Lastly, Ivy Renderer is Angular’s new renderer designed to make Angular smaller, easier to debug and compile faster. The team plans to provide a developer opt-in preview during the first half of the year.
More information on features aimed for the team’s next release is available here. Version 6.0 is expected in next month with the beta of Ivy Render, the Angular Package Format v 6, TypeScript 2.7 support and infrastructure improvements.
