Trip report from ngAtlanta: Angular’s Roadmap, Inclusion, and more
Last month I had the opportunity to speak at the ngAtlanta conference where I covered major parts of Angular’s 2018 roadmap and shared what I think is an interesting research-based rationale for focusing on diversity and inclusion as a strategy for productivity. You can check out the slides or watch my entire talk on YouTube.
I’m frequently impressed with the imagination and quality of conferences in the Angular community, but I think Zack Chapple and the rest of the conference team set a new bar on diversity with women making up over 60% of the speakers and with other diversity aspects well represented. Beyond the speaker diversity, the show had amazing content and I had great conversations with Angular developers from all around the world.
Feature Roadmap
Meta-points aside, here’s a few of the upcoming features I covered in our roadmap.
Bazel. Every developer at Google gets to use a consistently fast, reliable, multi-language build tool that is offered as an open source tool called Bazel. We’ve been working with the Bazel team on making this an option for Angular developers to get the same benefits. We’re now building Angular itself using Bazel and there are several early-adopters now starting to use it with their Angular apps. Complete details at g.co/ng/abc.
Schematics and ng update. We built the Angular CLI on a core technology called Schematics that lets anyone define custom templates and code transformations for use with the CLI. We’re shipping a new Schematics-based feature in CLI v1.7 called ng update that automatically updates your project dependencies and makes automated version fixes. With Schematics, you don’t have to wait for the CLI team to come up with features and you can build your own code transformations like ng update. Find out how in the Schematics blog post.
Component Dev Kit. We offer a complete set of accessible, high performance, feature-rich components in the Angular Material library. But what if you don’t use Material or you want a head start in building other components not offered there? This is where the CDK comes in. Providing the core functions we’ve used to build Angular Material, you can now create your own components using our battle-tested feature sets for accessibility, i18n, RTL, overlays, and much more. Check out the CDK blog post for how to get started.
Angular Elements. Want to let others embed your Angular components or even full apps in other apps written in vanilla JS or any other framework? Then you might like Angular Elements which lets you publish Angular components as Web Components that can be used anywhere. This is still in development, but we’re already using it on angular.io to make dynamic rendering easier. Check out Rob Wormald’s talk and this other Medium post for full project goals and details.
Ivy Renderer. Love Angular but just wish it was smaller, easier to debug, and compiled faster? These are our goals with Angular’s new renderer code-named Ivy. Its coming as a non-breaking change so you’ll get it automatically in a future release by just staying on Angular’s latest releases (which should be a breeze with ng update). We’ve got a ways to go, but we’re hopeful developers will be able to opt-in to a preview in the first half of this year. You can track our progress at ivy.angular.io.
And more! Beyond these features, you can track all that we’re aiming for in our next release of Angular in our milestones on GitHub.
Final Thoughts
The Angular team values applications users love to use, applications developers love to build, and a community where everyone feels welcome. I hope that ngAtlanta set a new standard for making everyone feel welcome with their emphasis on diversity and inclusiveness and that this is something everyone just ends up expecting as a given.
If you go to conferences this year that aren’t doing quite as well as ngAtlanta did in diversity, I urge you to send a message to the conference organizers pointing at ngAtlanta’s success as a beacon of what’s possible. And if they don’t get the message for future conferences, vote with your feet and go to conferences that do.
I know that I will.
