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When To Choose Angular

by | Angular, Frontend

When to choose Angular

We as developers are in the business of seeking reusable patterns to solve common engineering challenges. Frameworks with powerful tooling and robust package ecosystems give us the confidence to tackle projects, knowing that much of what we need is already provided for us.

For front end development, Angular is perhaps the best choice for building highly scalable, maintainable, and testable web applications with its modular, component-based architecture. Its features place it at the top among other choices for developers for several reasons.

Maintained by Google, its features are vast and well-documented. Its modular structure allows developers to define and build feature modules in reusable chunks. Reusable modules can be composed and shipped as applications or made available as libraries within Angular’s vast package ecosystem and open-source community.

Shared modules of component libraries like Angular Material or PrimeNG, let us use angular components implementations as the building blocks of new applications, making it easy for developers to compose and arrange application elements without building everything from scratch.

Other libraries, like NGRX, implement more complex programming patterns to help us solve problems like app state management. Let’s take a deeper look at when and why you should choose Angular for your web project.

Angular’s Modular Architecture

For developers setting out to write a clean and maintainable web application, Angular provides a clean and well-organized application architecture. At a high level, Angular implements a simplified version of the MVC architecture, with an orchestration of Angular components all held together by Angular modules.

Angular Modules

Applications are often organized in parts or logical divisions of features. With Angular modules, features are encapsulated within a group of one or more Angular components, services, and indeed other Angular modules.

The ability to nest Angular modules, importing child modules to extend one module with the capabilities of other modules, enables rapid development of common features. An application’s authentication module might, for instance, import an external library that implements a desired single sign-on authentication strategy. Authentication code doesn’t need to be reimplemented in this case, so the developer can focus on the custom components needed to consume and manage user data for authenticated users.

Whether you are using some libraries or no third-party code at all, creating feature modules and extending them with other modules enables a streamlined process for composing an application.

Lazy Loaded Modules and The Angular Router

A feature module may also hold a group of pages and expose a set of routes for visiting pages within the module. By including the Angular router in feature modules, groups of pages can be lazy loaded on demand when they are visited in the browser. This improves time to load of an Angular application, as the application does not load all of its parts at once.

Feature modules give developers an organized and easily scalable pattern for arranging project files with a predictable and hierarchical order. Let’s look at a specific code example:

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { Routes, RouterModule } from '@angular/router';

import { UserComponent } from './user.component';
import { RightsComponent } from './rights.component';
import { DashboardComponent } from './dashboard.component';

const routes: Routes = [
	{  path: 'user', component: UserComponent },
	{  path: 'rights', component: RightsComponent },
	{  path: 'dashboard', component: DashboardComponent },
];

@NgModule({
	imports: [RouterModule.forChild(routes)],
	exports: [RouterModule]
})
export class AdminRoutingModule {}

We see that this AdminRoutingModule defines some different routes to view Angular components:

  • UserComponent
  • RightsComponent
  • DashboardComponent. 

These routes can be registered in an admin.module.ts like above, which manages the declarations of the components to be viewed at each route, as seen below:

import { NgModule } from  '@angular/core';
import { CommonModule } from '@angular/common';

import { AdminRoutingModule } from './admin.routing.module';

import { UserComponent } from './user.component';
import { RightsComponent } from './rights.component';
import { DashboardComponent } from './dashboard.component';

@NgModule({
	declarations: [UserComponent, RightsComponent, DashboardComponent],
	imports: [
	  CommonModule,
	  AdminRoutingModule,
	],
	providers: [],
})
export class AdminModule {}

Then the Admin module itself can be registered at the root AppModule level of the application:

import { BrowserModule } from '@angular/platform-browser';
import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';

import { AppRoutingModule } from './app-routing.module';
import { AppComponent } from './app.component';

import { AdminModule } from './admin/admin.module';

@NgModule({
	declarations: [
	  AppComponent
	],
	imports: 
	  BrowserModule,
	  AppRoutingModule,
	  AdminModule
	],
	providers: [],
	bootstrap: [AppComponent]
})
export class AppModule {}

This example demonstrates how modules can be set-up hierarchically starting at the root level, with features modules managing configurations like routing or declaring components of features.

Component-Based Architecture With Services and Dependency Injection

While Angular applications are divided by modules, it is the use of components within each module that create a highly reusable, readable, and testable front end architecture. Each component has a template for displaying dynamic HTML and services that implement business and/or domain logic. This is especially helpful for maintainability in comparison to other frameworks where presentational logic and business logic can be mixed.

Given the reusable nature of Angular components, developers are empowered to arrange and compose Angular components, within a hierarchical structure that makes composing application views a breeze — that is, for each view. With each component having its own unit and end-to-end tests, Angular applications empower developers to create apps with test coverage using Jest or Karma/Jasmine, as well as end-to-end tests with tools like Cypress.

Angular Components

Angular components are declared in modules and hold web application page logic. For each page in a web application, we have a page level, main component that encapsulates the HTML template and its hierarchy of child components. With each main page component, child components can be defined to implement code in smaller pieces.

For example, in an application’s auth module registration page, some possible child components might include: dynamic header content, a registration widget with form, and a component to select and crop a profile picture. As views are created with page-level components and all of the smaller child components as building blocks, each page component is organized by route in the feature module, so the user can navigate to the page by route.

Angular Services

Services are provided to each component by way of dependency injection, so that shared logic can be leveraged across all application components. Presentational logic is written in component classes to handle actions like button clicks and other HTML events, or to display data dynamically.

Angular Modules and The Node Package Ecosystem

Another benefit of Angular development is the incredible support of Angular NPM packages. The high availability of open-source projects and shared packages let Devs accelerate their development velocity through a plethora of shared tools.

Some of the best packages available for Angular include the following: 

  • PrimeNg
  • Angular Material
  • Ionic
  • NGRX State Mgmt

Each of these implement specialized libraries that can be installed to extend Angular projects. Packaged libraries like PrimeNG, Angular Material, and Ionic provide modules with prebuilt Angular components that can be used in new projects. 

Angular Material implements components that match Google Material design UI/UX, so that devs can easily create web views that have a look and feel consistent with material design. Some example components that are able to be used are things like styled form controls, calendar date pickers, slider boolean controls, cards, and a grid system for positioning elements in web views. 

PrimeNG similarly provides its own flavor of components to developers. Prebuilt data tables that handle filtering and sorting columns, row selection, and displaying data to users are another important example that packaged UI libraries provide.

For mobile web applications, Ionic lets developers use Angular to use Native Mobile functionality and give the same look and feel as an iPhone or Android application. 

Lastly, NGRX provides an implementation of Angular’s redux style of state management, which facilitates a way to share data across components.

The possibilities for available NPM packages that are shared and used across Angular applications are pretty much endless. By exploring GitHub and online recommendations, Angular gives Devs access to the very best solutions to problems in front end development.

Built-In Features: Angular Forms API

Angular has several built in features that provide enhanced development capabilities over other solutions. For example, the forms API gives developers a powerful tool for building typed forms in Angular. If your application will have a lot of forms that require custom validations, dynamic fields that are shown or conditionally hidden with complex data models, Angular provides a clean way for handling all of these aspects.

Comparing Angular with Other Frameworks

While some developers prefer Angular as a front-end framework choice, others prefer other options like React or Vue.js. With this in mind, it is helpful to make the distinction of why to choose Angular over other options.

Angular Vs React and Vue

In comparison to React, Angular is known to have a steeper learning curve than React. Many developers will hit the ground running developing an application in React, but find later difficult to maintain as it grows in scale.

On the other hand, with its modularity, and tooling to support Angular’s sophisticated application architecture, applications are more maintainable and scalable out of the box. Add to this that Angular is supported by Google and has a widespread community documenting the best practices for architecting applications.

With all of the design patterns concretely established to support large applications, many agree that Angular is the best choice for complex web applications built to scale. If you are looking to build something smaller you might choose React or Vue instead.