angularI recently attended ng-conf (the annual Angular conference) held in Salt Lake City during the first week of May. Over 1500 developers were there. Of course the big news was that Angular 2, the next version of the framework, has moved from beta to release candidate.  Angular 2 (which departs substantially from earlier versions of Angular) has a forward looking emphasis, incorporating emerging technologies like web components, ES 2015 (the new version of JavaScript) and TypeScript.  You can read more about it here: http://angular.io.

Not surprisingly most of the workshops at the conference focused on Angular 2.  A single session track ran on both Day 1 and Day 3 and you can find the YouTube videos for those sessions on YouTube at this link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOETEcp3DkCq788xapkP_OU-78jhTf68j.  There were multiple concurrent sessions on Day 2 and not all of them were captured on video. I attended several that covered building components in Angular 2, TypeScript and unit testing.

Developer uptake has been strong with upwards of 360,000 developers who are active on the Angular 2 site.  Several enterprise partners that have started using Angular 2 were present, including Capital One, Fidelity Investments and the Weather Channel. Read More…

The term “Single Page Application” or SPA has emerged in recent years to describe a web or mobile application that focuses on improving the user experience by delivering all the functionality for an application without screen refreshes or unnecessary round trips to the server. It does this by initially loading the screen with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, enabling rich client-side interaction.  It then uses unobtrusive, asynchronous calls to the server when the page needs updating. Updates can be seamlessly propagated to elements on the screen while the user interacts with the application. By allowing real-time interaction with the application and its data on the screen, the user has the equivalent of a desktop application experience. Read More…