If you are a fan of Angular, there is some good news, Angular 5.0 will be released on 23th October – that’s next week. If you are wondering whether this is too soon, don’t. Google has committed to releasing a new version of Angular every 6 months. Angular 6.0 will be released next year in March/April followed by Angular 7 in September/October.

What does this mean for Angular 4 Users?

In this front, there is good news for existing users. Angular 5 has been built with backward compatibility with previous versions. You can upgrade as soon as the new version has been released without fear of breaking your existing application. This means you can enjoy the advantages of Angular 5 without spending hours upgrading your existing application.

“The primary goal of the backwards compatibility promise is to ensure that changes in the core framework and tooling don’t break the existing ecosystem of components and applications and don’t put undue upgrade/migration burden on Angular application and component authors.”

If you are moving from AngularJS to Angular4 or any version you can read the following post to learn from my own experience.

What’s new in Angular 5?

First, before we list the features, it’s important to note that the Angular team focusses on gradual improvement on this great framework we all love. That said, this are the most notable features:

Making Progressive Apps Easy to Build

If you are unaware, progressive web apps are web apps build on CSS, JavaScript and CSS that behave in some ways like native applications. The whole app is cached at the browser making it snappy and highly responsive as compared to a tradition web application. Users can add shortcuts to your web app on their application home making it easier to access. In progressive apps, internet is required only during REST API calls because the app is stored on the user browser. Angular 5 wants to make it even easier to build such apps for all devices.

A Build Optimizer to Remove Unnecessary Code

Developers are always concerned about the size of their apps. If it’s too big, it takes longer to load which affects user experience negatively. Since Angular is a large framework, at any time there could be hundreds or thousands of lines of code that your app doesn’t need. Even with the best coding practice, a single mistake can import a large chunk of unnecessary code into your application. Angular 5 is looking to improve that by trying to eliminate any unnecessary code from your application. This results into a more compact application which could improve your app performance drastically.

Making Material Design components compatible with server-side rendering

[caption id="attachment_708” align="aligncenter” width="1369”] Angular Material Design[/caption] For a good number of developers, rendering is done on the browser or the client side. But some devs would like to do the rendering at the backend or server-side. If you have a large application, it would not be prudent to send it to the browser to do the rendering because you don’t know the capabilities of the users’ device. Instead, you could do is render it in bits needed by the users and send them to the user to view. Angular 5 is extending the same to Googles own Material Design.

Performance Improvements and Bug Fixes

To put it simply, expect Angular 5 to perform way better than Angular 4 or any previous versions. Also, the advantages of a new version is lots of bugs will get fixed in the process.

Can I try Angular today?

Yes, you can try Angular 5 right away although it’s still in beta. Also, you can get the documentation of Angular 5 here. I would not advise you to use the beta version on a production app. This is because there could be unforeseen bugs which will be cleaned up before its released. That said, testing prerelease is good as you can help improve the framework before it has been released. Also, if your app is still in development, using Angular 5 can help you build a better app. Rather than waiting for it to be officially released before starting using it. Be sure to submit feedback in case of any bugs or errors.