A great deal has been made about the rapid shift toward enterprise mobility—especially among larger corporations—because it facilitates having employees work on mobile devices, sometimes even from their homes, and makes best use of today’s omni-present cloud services.
Since this generally results in vastly increased employee productivity and efficiency, there is a rush in business to embrace enterprise mobility and the tools which drive it. One of those tools rapidly gaining in popularity is AngularJS, which is an ideal coding framework for those companies involved with web development.
What is Angular JS?
Angular JS is an open source framework which can be used to develop dynamic web applications quickly. Because it uses HTML as its template language, it has broad appeal to web developers—most of whom already have a good understanding of the language. It goes far beyond basic HTML though, allowing for unlimited extensibility with HTML syntax to create more sophisticated constructs.
Whereas vanilla HTML is extremely good at defining static elements on web pages, Angular JS extends the syntax to allow for content which is much more dynamic. In addition, much of the code, which might normally have to be written for web applications, can be bypassed by AngularJS because of its built-in data binding and dependency injection, making it a compact and efficient medium to work with.
Reasons for the Popularity of AngularJS
Some of the reasons for the mushrooming popularity of AngularJS include the following:
- It incorporates a fresh design approach wherein designers place user interface elements on a page without regard to any coding requirements, which ensures that everything about the app looks right and appeals to users. Other engineers later supply the logic which makes those elements functional.
- AngularJS is capable of creating single-page apps (SPAs), which are rising in popularity right along with increased use of mobile devices. The big advantage of SPAs is that when users click on any part of the web page they’re viewing, it does not have to reload, which would degrade the user’s web experience.
- Some very powerful companies such as Google, use AngularJS extensively for web development. Google maintains the framework of AngularJS, and often marries it with its other products, such as DoubleClick and YouTube Leanback. Google isn’t the only strong supporter of AngularJS, however, and it has now become 16 times more popular than the next closest competitor, React, which serves as the framework for Facebook.
- Angular’s use of directives allows developers to invent their own HTML tags and code them into a web page, and separately develop the manipulative logic which creates the desired behavior directed by the invented set of tags. This separation makes it easy to maintain the focus of the web page on merely updating the view, rather than on any behavioral requirements.
- Less code needs to be written because of the features used by AngularJS. Data binding means that no data has to be directly loaded into the HTML view, and the logic behind directives can be developed by another team of engineers entirely.
- AngularJS is a comprehensive coding framework, similar to JavaScriptMVC in its breadth and represents a total solution for quickly developing front-ends. Any data-driven web application can be completely developed without the use of additional plug-ins or other frameworks.