At the Angular U conference in San Francisco, Brad Green, Igor Minar, and Misko Hevery took the keynote stage to recap what they announced at ng-conf earlier this year and give a roadmap of what's to come during the rest of 2015.
Minar showed off some new developments that have appeared since March. Careful to make it clear these are "experiments", he presented the idea of splitting Angular into two pieces: core functionality and renderer. By cleaving the framework, they hope to enable new and interesting ways of using Angular, starting with the following three areas:
- Improve performance
- Rich mobile experience
- Server side rendering
For web performance, a split framework would allow Angular to offload much of the non-UI work to a web worker. The UI must be on the main thread, so the separate renderer would live there and the two pieces would communicate with each other. Minar continued:
We are thinking, 'Could we actually move the whole application into web worker, so that all of the business logic, all of the data fetching and processing is happening off of the main thread?' And additionally, 'Could we move the framework itself into the web worker?' So that all of the services that the framework provides as well as dirty checking don't run on the main thread."
After the Angular team met with the React team, the question in the air was "what could an integration between Angular and React Native look like?" In the new scenarios, the core piece remains the same, but the renderer can be switched out to support new platforms, such as iOS and Android.
Minar demonstrated Angular JavaScript running inside a native iOS shell using React Native markup with Angular style interpolation. Rather than rebuilding this scenario from scratch, the team is working with Telerik and their NativeScript platform as well as with the React team to realize these goals. The demo is available on GitHub.
Angular developers have long been clamoring for server side rendering in order to solve problems such as improved startup time and SEO. The proposed architecture also enables possible solution to this problem.
For web developers, the architecture change is largely transparent. Google has posted a brief of the architecture split for developers to review.
Green also gave an update on when Angular 2 will be done. He did not commit to a date, but laid out the steps the project will take before release. For now, the team is working on finishing the core and getting feedback from the internal teams at Google that are currently migrating. After the core is done, they will move on to API sugar, improving performance, and documentation.
Green also spoke a bit about Angular 1.X and its place in the roadmap. "The focus of Angular 1.5 is to be migration," he said. Google is also working on new automated migration tools, some of which already exist internally. "We're going to see which of those make sense to reflect out to [the community]," he said. Additionally, they are working on guides to assist developers in the migration. For more information on the keynote, watch the video or check out the slides.
Angular U is the second of three events the Angular team is participating in this year. The third event, Angular Connect will be held in October 2015 in London.