I spent a lot of time blogging about AngularJS in the past. Time moves on, especially on the Internet and Google is feverishly working on finishing up Angular2, which is currently in release candidate as of this writing (August of 2016).

We will take a similar approach to last time, where we developed a periodic table application that investigates different features about Angular.

One thing to note, Google has renamed Angular 2. The previous version of AngularJS, the 1.x stack was called AngularJS. The new version is now called just Angular. Part of the reason for this is to show its ability to create native mobile applications, so the JavaScript name can be a bit limiting. We will, in general, keep the same names. Angular and/or Angular 2 will refer to the current version of Anuglar. The older versions will be called AngularJS or Angular 1.x.

First though, why even upgrade at all, since the upgrade path from Angular 1.x to Angular 2? Let's highlight some reasons.

Component Based

Web development is moving towards component based development, especially with some of the emerging web standards. While those standards are not fully completed yet, Google is definitley preparing for that world. If you need further proof, checkout Google's Polymer project.

TypeScript

TypeScript is an extension of JavaScript created by Microsoft, open sourced and adopted by Google (I know!! Right?!?!) TypeScript essentially is ECMAScript 6, combined with the ability to create type and annotations. It is used to create Angular. The code samples developed by Google are all in TypeScript, with JavaScipt following later. You don't HAVE to use TypeScript, but it will make life easier.

Virtual DOM

One of the things ReactJS taught the world, is the value of a Virtual DOM. This is a virtual representation of the Document Object Model (DOM) for a HTML page. You can then work on this in memory which offers GREAT performance improvements. Google has adopted a Virtual DOM and has realized the expected performance boosts.

Those are a few of the highlights of why Angular2 over AngularJS 1.x. We will hit more as we contineu our series.