The latest release of Angular has landed (and of course, Kendo UI is fully compatible). Check out the best of what's new in Angular 5.
As some of you may be aware, Angular 5 quietly released on November 1st. Originally the Angular team had planned to release this on October 23rd, but just eight days later isn't too bad for a large open source framework like Angular. For those of you worried about upgrading there's not too much to be afraid of; the jump from 4.x to 5 is not as big as going from 2.x to 4!
I won't dive in to every feature in-depth as we'd be here all day. That being said, here are some of the highlights for why you should care about the Angular 5 release and potentially some items to watch out for.
Angular's Build Optimizer now makes your application bundles even smaller. For those of you unfamiliar with this tool, it's a CLI tool that helps optimize (duh) the bundles that your application creates. You don't need to do anything to take advantage of this aside from upgrading to Angular 5 and using the CLI tool to reduce your packages—super easy!
Ahead of Time (AoT) Compilation is now enabled by default for production builds of your application. This is a great feature of Angular that ensures a more performant app across the board. This is pretty crucial because a framework like Angular does bring a certain amount of overhead (whether we like to admit it or not) and AoT aims to reduce this overhead as much as possible (along with Tree Shaking and such). It seems like developers weren't taking advantage of this great part of the Angular framework, so now its enabled by default.
P.S. Kendo UI supports AoT compilation 😉 D.S.
With Angular 5 the Angular team introduced the @angular/service-worker
package to help add service workers, the heart of Progressive Web Apps, to any Angular application. Previously this had to be done manually, or with other packages, but now it is available out-of-the-box with Angular 5. This is a great step towards making your Angular applications a little more native on mobile.
While I could write about even more changes, here are some other highlights around performance and positive changes to look out for:
addEventListener
to speed up renderingActivationStart
and ActivationEnd
events.For more in-depth information around the release and what it contains you can refer to the official Angular 5.0.0 changelog file on GitHub.
There are some breaking changes to watch out for, mainly that Angular now requires TypeScript 2.4.x. Outside of that any breaking changes will only affect you if you implemented certain parts of Angular, so here's a list of some of the breaking changes to be aware of:
@angular/platform-server
) depends on @angular/platform-browser-dynamic
as a peer dependency.As mentioned before, for even more information you can refer to Angular's official changelog file on GitHub. To keep up with the latest with Angular you can also refer to this resource on all things Angular.
That's right folks! Thanks to the work of the Kendo UI dev team, who followed the RC releases of Angular 5 closely, I can proudly say that Kendo UI supports Angular 5 today! In fact, we've had full support even before November 1st as all packages have been tested throughout the various RCs and passed tests against Angular 5 as well. So, feel free to upgrade to Angular 5 and keep on using (or start using—what are you waiting for?) Kendo UI in your applications!
Haven't tried Kendo UI in your Angular applications yet? What are you waiting for? Give it a try and add it to your applications today!
Carl Bergenhem is the Product Manager for Kendo UI. Throughout his time at Telerik/Progress he has covered the entire portfolio of products offered, but mainly spent his time in the web development arena covering ASP.NET Ajax, ASP.NET MVC, and JavaScript-based products. He’s passionate about web technologies and tries to stay on top of all JavaScript libraries and frameworks relating to Kendo UI, developing with jQuery, Angular, React, and Vue.js on a regular basis. In his free time Carl enjoys slaying virtual monsters, snowboarding and playing his guitar.