Google has released version 11 of Angular, its popular Single Page Application framework. The release focuses on improving the developer experience and finalizing the cleanup of the issue tracker.
Following the significant changes made in Angular 9 with the release of Ivy, the Angular development team chose to dedicate the following releases to address many of the bugs and concerns that were raised by the community.
As part of this process, the team started to sort through the backlog of issues in order to better understand the community needs as well as to fix many of the bugs that have been accumulating over the years.
After nearly six months of work, this goal has finally been achieved. The GitHub issue tracker has been organized and a significant number of bugs have either been fixed or temporarily triaged pending further investigation.
Furthermore, the Angular development committed that going forward, all new issues reported in GitHub will be triaged within 2 weeks.
On the developer experience front, Angular 11 offers several improvements that aim to simplify the development process.
Hot Module Replacement implementation has been improved and can now be initialized using the --hmr flag.
ng serve --hmr
With HMR, the Angular application does not need a full page refresh whenever the code changes. Instead, the latest changes to the code, style, and templates will be updated directly while preserving the current state of the application.
The build process itself has also gained a speed boost both from upgrading to TypeScript 4.0 and through improving the ngcc update process.
For even better results, developers can now opt-in to the experimental Webpack 5 support which offers faster builds with persistent disk caching and smaller bundle sizes using improved tree-shaking. To enable Webpack5 support, simply add the following property to the package.json file:
"resolutions": { "webpack": "5.4.0" }
Finally, the Angular language service, a popular add-on that offers autocomplete, type checking, etc. in Angular templates is being transitioned to the new Ivy engine, offering improved support for generic types. The add-on is available in most of the popular code editors as a plugin.
To upgrade existing projects to Angular 11, run the following command:
ng update @angular/cli @angular/core
For more complex updates, developers should use the interactive update guide provided by the Angular team.
You can read more about the Angular 11 release in the official blog post.
Angular is open source software available under the MIT license. Contributions are welcome via the Angular GitHub repository.