Every time Angular improves its version, it delights the developers with innovative features to overcome various challenges. As it keeps evolving with great consistency, Angular adds promising improvements and optimizations. The next version called Angular 18 was released on May 22 and the community is quite happy with the version. It is now available for developers and has a multitude of features. It promises strikingly amazing performance and improved robustness than before.
The new Angular 18 has released over 20 features and updates this month. We are here to highlight some of the top features that can help you enhance your web development performance.
Why is Angular 18 so Important?
In the web development space, Angular has consistently served as a robust framework for building scalable web applications. With every new version, Angular offers improvements that help overcome pain points. It also adds new features. Hiring professional developers gives you consistent application performance and productivity with a better user experience.
Top Features and Updates of Angular 18
Introducing Standalone Components
The new Angular 18 introduces standalone components, allowing developers to create components not dependent on Angular modules. These components will now become better, modular, and easier to reuse. They can be used for different parts of an application or various other projects. With standalone components, developers can considerably lower the costs of module management.
Improved Reactivity Model
With the introduction of an enhanced reactivity model, Angular 18 simplifies state management and data flow inside the applications. The new model is now more engaging, reduces boilerplate code, and simplifies managing complex state conversations. Overall, it enhances performance by increasing the efficiency of change detection mechanisms.
Enhanced Build Performance
Angular has always remained efficient because of its build performance feature, which enhances the Angular development workflow. Angular 18 comes with several optimizations including reduction in build times for large projects. Angular CLI has improved caching mechanisms and incremental compilation. It can build faster and can contribute to producing more efficient development cycles.
ESM Support
Now Angular 18 completely supports ECMAScript Modules (ESM) and streamlines with modern JavaScript standards. ESM support provides enhanced compatibility and provides several other libraries and tools. Developers can now efficiently perform code splitting and loading, improving faster primary load times and providing better user experiences.
Advanced Template Type Checking
With this new improvement, developers can trace the errors at an early stage of development. It also increases code reliability and lowers debugging time. The improved type checking helps perform complex type scenarios and protects applications with more predictability.
Better Handling of State-management
Initially, state management in Angular was handled traditionally by using global state libraries and services. The new Angular 18 enables developers to manage the state at the component level. State management becomes easy for small as well as medium applications and component interactions.
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Developer Tooling Becomes More Supportive
Developer tooling is now more supportive in AngularDevTools. It gives better insights regarding app performance, state changes, and dependency management. Developers having strong knowledge of Angular 17 will now find it easier to debug and optimize applications.
Improved Angular Material and CDK
The Component Dev Kit (CDK) and Angular Material will seamlessly align with Angular 18’s new features. There are various updates like enhanced accessibility features and performance optimizations. The CDK enhancements create custom components, enabling better interactions and behaviors.
Server-side Rendering
Angular 18 has optimized server-side rendering to a great extent with its new version. It can now perform better and integrate easily with various components. The improvements are majorly in pre-rendering capabilities, better support for Angular Universal, and rapid hydration on the server-side. Overall, it reduces the time between interactions and enhances user experiences even during slow networks.
Enhanced Internationalization Support
Localizing applications will now become easier with internalization support. Translation process and language version management will be streamlined with new APIs and improved tooling. Developers who work on applications will get better benefits when they target any global audience
Improved Accessibility
Applications will be more accessible with more enhancements available in Angular 18. With new components and directives, developers can ensure better performance with higher accessibility features.
Redirecting Routes with Functions
The new version of Angular 18 facilitates developers to manage redirects using functions from plain strings. With enhanced routing capabilities, developers can leverage new features. By partnering with a reputed Angular development company, you can enhance your project performance.
const routes: Routes = [
{ path: 'page1', redirectTo: (url) => '/page2', pathMatch: 'full' }
];
Default ng-content
Angular 18 gives default content that comes within the ng-content tag. It brings over great flexibility and gives fallback content when there is no supportive projection.
New RedirectCommand class
The new Redirect Command class manages NavigationExtras. Developers utilize this new feature to handle complex navigation patterns.
const route: Route = {
path: 'page1',
component: PageComponent,
canActivate: [
() => {
const router: Router = inject(Router);
const urlTree: UrlTree = router.parseUrl('./page2');
return new RedirectCommand(urlTree, { skipLocationChange: true });
},
],
};
Zoneless Applications
Ivy is Angular’s new rendering machine and it will keep its performance at par along with improved bundle size. The improvements are in tree shaking capabilities with reduced bundle size, and removing unused code. This further leads to smaller, more effective production bundles and faster load times, ensuring improved performance.
TypeScript 4.7 Available
The new Angular 18 has TypeScript 4.7 support which helps developers to harness the features of TypeScript. They are:
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Template literal types help developers clearly define template types and detect errors initially.
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Readonly support becomes better and more reliable
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With new import types, codes can be more organized with modularity.
Better CLI commands
Developers can perform better by sending updates to Angular CLI commands. The new commands are ng generate component with auto-routing setup and ng lint with enhanced rule configuration.
AOT Compilation Becomes Better
Angular 18 will now provide advanced optimizations in Ahead-of-time compilation. This will bring rapid startup times, resulting in smaller code groups to improve overall performance.
WebAssembly Support Improves
By using WebAssembly modules directly in components, developers will find better opportunities to improve performance in computations and integrations with the existing WebAssembly libraries
Improved Router Guards
The router guards now have more lifecycle hooks for developers to efficiently handle deactivation and route activation.
Enhanced Error Handling
Angular 18 now clearly defines error messages in a descriptive and actionable manner. Developers can rapidly find out the issues and resolve them in the middle of the development process.
New Packages available
Angular 18 provides @angular/localize package for localization and internalization. Through this, developers can extract and translate strings in applications.
Conclusion
Angular 18 is highly recommended for new projects. By hiring professional developers from a reputed Angular development company, you can create exceptional web applications. The latest framework ensures simple coding and lots of improvements and enhancements. Angular 18 is one of the biggest developments in the web application framework space. It has an improved reactivity model, better build performance, standalone components, and lots more. You can refer to the documentation and guides to understand its new features and best practices.
Whitelotus Corporation is a leading Angular development company, that delivers robust web applications for different industries. You can hire Angular developers from Whitelotus Corporation to build small and large-scale enterprise applications. We know how to harness the tools and functionalities of Angular 18 to create the best web applications that will meet your expectations.
