Angular 16: New Features and Updates | Tecoreng

Angular 16 introduction and its new features and all updates we are trying to explain and simplify it. So, Move ahead with this article.

The Angular team at Google never leaves a stone unturned to turn up the excitement levels for the development community at Angular. Therefore, continuing their traditional release frequency of a major six months, the next version of the popular angular framework is here.

However, if you are a business owner or developer wondering what is the latest version of Angular? The answer is here because Team Angular has released the latest Angular version with significant advancements in reactivity, server-side rendering, and tooling. 

In this blog post, we have covered an overview of Angular 16 Features and Updates brought for you with the Angular 16 release. 

Angular 16 Introduction

Since the release of Angular 14, it is undeniable that each version brings a lot of new features, and Angular 16 brings much more than this novelty.

For a while now we’ve been hearing about the integration of the signals pattern in Angular, but Angular 16 brings much more than this novelty. 

The latest release of the popular fronted framework Angular has been introduced by the Google team, with the Angular 16 release date on May 3, 2023. According to Minko Gechev, Angular v16 is considered significant and the largest release since its initial launch.

While we previously covered the impressive changes in Angular 15. In our last blog, the stakes are even higher this time with the latest Angular version. Angular Team has stepped up to the challenge, and this latest version of Angular in 2023 has delivered impressive features and updates for all, including developers, business owners, and tech enthusiasts. 

What’s New In Angular 16 

Six months ago, a significant milestone is a reach in Angular’s journey toward simplicity and enhanced developer experience. The standalone APIs transitioned out of the developer’s preview phase. 

With its most recent release changes and improvements, Angular v16 has joined the Angular revolution and is now even better and more effective for the developer community and tech lovers.

Technical Core Engineers is a top-rated company specializing in AngularJS web app development company. Let’s know the new features and updates of Angular 16.

Angular 16: Features and Updates

Reactivity Revamped

Developers’ experience is important when it comes to web application development, and the new Reactivity Model initially intends to improve your developer’s performance and experience. 

A noteworthy advantage of this feature is that it is completely backward compatible and interoperable with the current system. Some of the benefits of these features include:

1. Improved runtime performance due to reducing computations during the change detection process. 
2. A simple mental model for reactivity that clearly defines the view’s dependencies and data flow throughout the application.
3. Fine-grained reactivity that allows for future releases to check changes only in affected components. 
4. The ability to make Zone.js optional in future releases to check changes only in affected components.
5. The delivery of computed properties without the penalty of recomputation in each change detection cycle.
6. Better interoperability with RxJS through a plan to introduce reactive inputs.

Reactivity Model and Zone.js

One highly anticipated feature of Angular v16 is the reworked reactivity model, which allows developers to improve runtime performance by making Zone.Js optional. This allows developers to choose other reactivity management methods, like RxJS or signals.

Angular Signals

The newest feature that makes it possible to control state changes in Angular apps is called signals. Signals are functions that can be modified by calling them with a new value using the set() method. They were inspired by Solid.js and returned a value using the get() method.

Additionally, signals allow for the development of reactive value graphs, which dynamically update dependencies as they change. These reactive value graphs may be paired with RxJS observables, which are still supported in the most recent version of Angular, to provide robust declarative data.

Server-Side Rendering

One of Angular’s biggest weaknesses against React was its lack of server-side rendering (SSR) capability. This problem has been rectified by some important server-side rendering enhancements in Angular 16.

Earlier, Angular’s SSR method used damaging hydration. The server renders and loads the application onto the browser first in destructive hydration. After that, when the client app is downloaded and bootstrapped, it obliterates the previously rendered DOM and starts over with rendering. This strategy hurt several Core Web Vitals like LCP or CLS.anug and resulted in serious UX problems like screen flickering.

To avoid these issues, Angular 16 offers a novel technique called non-destructive hydration. When the client app is downloaded and bootstrapped, the DOM is not deleted. While adding client-side functionality like event listeners, it still utilizes the same DOM.

Experimental Jest Support

Jest is one of the most-used testing frameworks among JavaScript developers. Angular has listened to developer requests and has introduced experimental jest support with Angular 16.

Esbuild dev server

Experimental support for ng build using Esbuid is already available. In the Angular 16 version, the team has introduced support for ng serve using Esbuild is also added. Though initially, it is experimental, several performance-related improvements and optimizations are yet to be made. Still, it offers a significantly faster startup time (approximately 2 times faster) than the web pack implementation. 

Required Components Inputs

The latest version of Angular has notable features that enhance the developer experience and code quality. With these features, developers can mark certain inputs of components as required, ensuring that the parent component provides them or throws an error. This feature helps catch bugs and typing errors simultaneously and ensures that components receive all the necessary data to function efficiently. Moreover, these features help to make components more self-documenting and easier to use.

Non-Destructive Hydration 

The process of transforming server-side-produced HTML material into a fully dynamic and useful web page on the client side by affixing JavaScript functionality and event listeners is well-known in the development community. 

In order to enhance server-side rendering and hydration performance and developer experience, Angular has teamed up with the Chrome Aurora Team. Hydration support was present in React and Next.js, but it was difficult to add to Angular. The most recent version of Angular, however, comes with out-of-the-box support for hydration, which speeds up and improves SSR apps.

With the whole app’s non-destructive hydration, Angular looks at existing DOM nodes while creating internal data structures and attaching event listeners to those nodes rather than re-rendering the application from scratch. The benefits of the most recent implementation include

• No content flickering
• Better Web Core Vitals
• Future-enabled architecture
• Easy integration with existing applications
• Incremental adoption of hydration with the ngSkipHydration attribute in templates for components performing manual DOM manipulation.

According to the official documentation, early tests show up to a 45% improvement in the Largest Content Paint with full app hydration.

Dependency Injection Debugging APIs

With this new functionality, it is possible to scrutinize and troubleshoot the dependency injection system in Angular apps. By utilizing these APIs, your development team can retrieve details on the providers, tokens, injectors, scopes, and instances related to your dependencies. Furthermore, these APIs can imitate diverse scenarios or examination cases for your dependencies. 

Conclusion

Finally, Angular 16 has delivered some significant features. Most of these features are stepping stones to much larger updates we can experts in the subsequent versions. You can follow Angular’s official documentation to upgrade your existing projects to Angular 16.

Hire Angular Developer from Tecoreng to fully utilize this formidable framework if you’re a product owner wanting to construct your next project with Angular. Use the advantages of the most recent Angular 16 upgrade to your web application development’s long-term advantage.