Angular 5 is Here!

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!

Release Highlights

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.

Optimization of Bundle Sizes (aka smaller bundles)

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!

AoT Compilation Enabled by Default

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.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

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.

Miscellaneous Changes

While I could write about even more changes, here are some other highlights around performance and positive changes to look out for:

• Angular Universal now offers an API to transfer state from the server
• Angular Universal provides a DOM implementation on the server
• Angular 5 now uses the native addEventListener to speed up rendering
• The Router library now has events that allow you to track individual routes, specifically ActivationStart and ActivationEnd events.
• Angular CLI is now on version 1.5

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.

Breaking Changes

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 5 requires TypeScript 2.4.x.
• Angular Universal (@angular/platform-server) depends on @angular/platform-browser-dynamic as a peer dependency.
• Angular 5 only contains locale data for en-US (by default). Any other locale data will have to be imported (related to i18n)
• The default value for symbolDisplay is now a symbol instead of code ($ vs USD)
• There have been quite a lot of updates to how dates are handled. For more information you can visit this section of the changelog file.
• There's of course some deprecated code to watch out for. Rather than listing it all here I recommend reading over the deprecated code section of the changelog.

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.

Kendo UI Supports Angular 5

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!