In late November 2016 we visited one of the world’s biggest Angular conferences – ngPoland. Just two months before, Angular2 had been released, so all the sessions were more or less discussing it.

The first session was focused at Angular CLI. Tracy Lee showed us how to make a simple application and put it into Firebase in 30 minutes. All with the help of Angular CLI – a command line tool which helps build applications faster, since it prepares your dev environment and you can start coding right away.
We’ve already tried Angular CLI in our project and it’s great. Do you want to watch functionality with live reload, do unit testing with Karma, and end-to-end testing with Protractor? It’s all there, plus much more.

Shai Reznik told us the Legend Of ngModules, a pretty funny story with lot of interesting info on how to write, yes, modules. Seems like a skilled developer should know how to structure applications, but it’s nice to be reminded those best practices every now and then. Especially, when it’s your first try with Angular 2 and TypeScript.

There were few moments when we called „It‘s (put year here), so use (put library/pattern/language here).“ Like „It’s 2005, use asynchronous calls,“ or „It‘s 2015, use promises, callbacks are baaaad“. Now we have another one: „It’s 2016, use observables!“ On this topic, Ben Lesh had a good talk about the RxJS library, which implements the Observer pattern for composing asynchronous and event-base programs.
We’ve tried RxJS, and it works pretty well. We replaced promises in our AJAX calls and events in components. It needs some time to get used to, but it gets pretty straightforward then.

There were more good talks at the Ng Poland conference, so it’s awesome that we all can watch the recordings on YouTube.

I would like to conclude this article with some advice: in the case you are about to start a new project and are deciding between Angular 1, which you’ve used before, and have knowledge of, together with skills and code snippets, and Angular 2, use the second one. Angular 2 is simply better.

PS: If you choose to accept my advice, be prepared for lack of documentation. But it’s getting better every day, trust me.

Daniel Malachovský

Technical Leader in Pantheon Technologies