Angular

What exactly is Angular?

AngularJS is a leading framework for building javascript heavy single page based web applications. Single page apps or SPA load the entire content of a site within a single page. Single page app is usually an index.html file. This means that once the main page is loaded, clicking on links will not reload the entire page, but simply update sections within the page itself.

The popularity of  SPA based web apps has taken off based on the fact they allow us to deliver rich, dynamic and fast loading content that mimics that of desktop applications. One big difference between Angular based sites and traditional ones is that Angular expects the browser to build the page. The server sends to the browser all the data to build a page which includes the HTML, CSS and Javascript files and the browser does the work of building the final template that's displayed in a web page.

This may seem like a lot of work for the browser but it actually results in much faster load times. When compared to more traditional applications that use PHP or Java, the server is responsible for all the heavy lifting. This includes accepting requests, fetching the data, along with building the final page.

In addition to the increases in speed and performance, Angular allows us to write much more succeded code than using plain javascript. We are also able to track, process and display changes from the user using the magic of data binding.

Angular was developed with three key concepts in mind;

1. Make it modular
2. Make it testable
3. Make it maintainable