The Angular team released Angular version 5 on November 1, 2017. The official announcement informs us that this is a major release with a lot of bug fixes, updates, and new features.
Stephen Fluin from the Angular team
writes,
“This release continues our focus on making Angular smaller, faster, and easier to use.”
Given below are the major points that make Angular v5 more useful.
- A Build Optimizer tool is included in Angular CLI that will work on making the bundles smaller in size.
- Server-side rendering has been added to Angular v5 via ServerTransferStateModule and the corresponding BrowserTransferStateModule. This will help the users run scrapers and crawlers even if they don’t support JavaScript.
- According to the blog, “Another change from the Angular Universal team is the addition of Domino to platform-server. Domino means that we support more DOM manipulations out of the box within server-side contexts, improving our support for 3rd party JS and Component libraries that aren’t server-side aware.”
- Angular v5 is equipped with an improved compiler to provide faster rebuilds of production builds and builds with AOT.
- Removal of whitespaces saves a lot of data volume. With improved Decorators, it is now possible to ship small bundles.
- With AOT flag turned on and by using ng serve, users can now leverage TypeScript Transforms (released with TS2.3) in the Angular compiler. This can save the rebuilding time by up to 95%.
- You can now choose whether or not to preserve whitespace coming from your components and your application so as to save the data size while bundling the package.
Source: angular.io
- The new version, i.e., Angular v5 is now more standardized across browsers and now, you don’t need i18n polyfills to some extent. The new number, date, and currency pipes have been built and added to Angular v5.
“In 5.0.0 we’ve updated the pipes to use our own implementation, relying on the CLDR to provide extensive locale support and configurations for any locales you want to support.”
- The ReflectiveInjector is replaced with StaticInjector so as to reduce the application size.
- One breaking change in this update is added support for Angular v5 in Angular CLI v1.5. Now, it will generate v5 projects by default.
Apart from these, there is a long list of improvements and new features. You can see the full list from the
changelog. To learn how to upgrade your Angular version, visit this
specially developed app that guides you through the process.