As we discussed in the introductory blog in this series, AngularJS is an open source web application framework which is maintained by Google and a group or community of corporations and individual developers. It was developed to address the numerous challenges that developers and organizations face when developing single page or static applications.
So, just a quick review of the Angular series to date before we conclude, we’ve talked about why developers like to use it and how it works well for an array of website building projects, for single page applications, and especially when paired with Web API. In this Final blog in this series, let’s bring it all together.
As many developers will tell you, HTML is very good when you are declaring static documents but it fails miserably once you try declaring dynamic views in a web application. AngularJS comes in quite handy in this regard because it does allow developers to extend HTML vocabulary into an application, in the end giving you an environment that’s quick to develop, easy to read, and very expressive.
In simple terms, it is a set of tools specifically meant to help you and your team to build the framework that’s most suited to the application which you and your team are developing. It is not only fully extensible, but it also works extremely well with libraries from other development platforms. As a matter of fact, every feature of Angular can either be replaced or modified to suit the unique development workflow your team may be employing.
The framework is also well organized and does provide developers with a structure that guides them through the process of building a complete application; from designing the user interface to writing the required business logic to carrying out thorough and up-to-date testing of the application before deploying it and anything in between.
It is worth noting that, with Angular, it's easy to create reusable components. This has the major advantage of allowing developers to separately focus on either how the application looks or focus on what the application does. This is possible because the components will allow developers to hide all those complex structures and behaviors unique to the application being developed. The framework basically decouples the server side of an application from the application side, in the process; it does allow your team of developers to work in parallel. This has the added advantage of saving time and allowing the team to re-use either side.
With current applications, localization is very important. It is imperative for any app to be readily available in all locations. AngularJS achieves this by availing features which gives the developer the appropriate building blocks to ensure your application is availed in all required locales.
One of the major benefits of this framework is that if you have already invested in other technologies then there is no need to worry because AngularJS does work pretty well with all kinds of different technologies. It is possible to add as much or as little as you desire to an existing page within a very short time. The main difference with other alternative frameworks is that they usually require full commitment or entire overhaul of the page.
It is also worth noting that this framework was designed, from the ground up, to be testable. It does this by basically considering the process of application testing to be as important as the process of application writing, this is because the code used in structured in such a way that makes testing not only simple to perform but also more accurate.
So, we hope that you've enjoyed and learned something about AngularJS by way of this series. It can be a very good friend to you developers out there. Now go forth and create!