What is Google’s Angular Framework?

We build our websites using a frontend framework called Angular, which was created and is maintained by Google. Those of you that work in tech recruitment may have come across it before. Other frontend frameworks include React (officially a library but ignore this), Vue, Svelte, Next and Ember. It gives a developer a structure to work with, a skeleton for the website and tools the developer can use to achieve complex functionality. 

Websites built using Angular include YouTube, PayPal, Forbes, Microsoft, Deutsche Bank, UpWork, The Guardian and a lot of Google’s websites. 

It basically makes my job as a developer a little easier but also way more complicated at the same time. 

Angular is a framework for building user interfaces - essentially all the pages you see on your website. It provides building blocks to help us as developers quickly set up a maintainable and scalable app. It provides us with tools that help us easily block certain pages to non-authenticated or non-authorized users or tools to manage state or that help us implement certain changes through the course of the website page loading. Angular empowers us as developers to build web, mobile and desktop apps.

The first iteration of Angular, which is known as ”AngularJS” was released in 2010. AngularJS is hugely different from the Angular we know today, “Angular 2+”, which was first released in 2016. A new version of Angular is released every 6 months by the Google Angular dev team. At the time of writing, the current version of Angular is 16. 

Angular uses TypeScript instead of JavaScript (the more well-known sibling in the frontend space). TypeScript tends to have less bugs in production, it can be more verbose, is type safe and has a higher learning curve when compared to JavaScript. TypeScript is also a compiled language compared to JavaScript, which is interpreted. 

Angular allows us to split an application in such a way that it becomes more maintainable, testable and extensible. Due to the number of in-built tools in Angular it allows us to create complete & complex applications that are larger and more powerful than a standard website. 

Angular eliminates the need for much of the code that we would normally have with a standard HTML, CSS & JS website. In addition, the source code becomes significantly smaller and ultimately means a smaller & faster website.  

At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter how your website is made, whether it’s a React app, a WordPress site made for you by a friend or an Angular/Firebase app, like Abstraction Labs makes. What really matters is, has it been made well (fast, SEO optimised, great content & accessible) and has it been thoroughly tested? That’s what you should really focus on.

Get in touch with us if you’d like to discover how we can create a high performing, easily maintainable and scalable website for your business.