Back in 2018, Google confirmed that they are slowly phasing out AngularJS and entered a three-year long-term support (LTS) period. This meant that AngularJS wouldn’t receive any new features, and updates would be limited to bug fixes and security patches. The LTS period was stated to end in May 2021, but it was extended to December 2021 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
The final nail in the coffin was struck in January of this year, when Mark Thompson, a Developer Advocate on Google’s Angular Team, confirmed the end of AngularJS through a blog, ‘Discontinued Long Term Support for AngularJS’ on Angular’s official website. He urged everyone to upgrade to the latest version of its successor Angular for better productivity, scalability, and improved performance.
Why migrate away from AngularJS?
Quite simply, AngularJS is now outdated and won’t be receiving any more updates! If you are business and want to future-proof your platforms, migrating away from AngularJS is the best way to mitigate some of the limitations mentioned below:
Support and Updates
For any technology to sustain itself in the long run, constant updates and upgrades are required. You might not like this process, but it is an inevitable part of development and improvement. Without any support, AngularJS is bound to die out and any platform that runs on it. This makes the switch to a different framework such as Angular a matter of when and not if. If you ask me, it should be done at the earliest.
Top Talents and Developers
Your business will find it harder and harder to get the best developers to work for you if you continue to be based on outdated toolsets such as AngularJS. Furthermore, the longer you put off migration, the harder it becomes to get the best people to do it properly.
Speed and Productivity
By moving to better, more comprehensive frameworks such as Angular, you limit the use of 3rd party apps and generally have fewer variables to worry about. Compilation and debugging speed are improved, there are lesser run-time errors, application development speed and workforce productivity increases.
Multi-screen Support
With more than half the internet population consuming through mobile, your business must run on mobile or multi-screen optimized frameworks. This is one of the gaping limitations of AngularJS, which its successor, Angular, addresses very well.
As I said, it is better to migrate your business as soon as possible. However, In case you are unable to migrate now, here are the things that will remain with AngularJS even after the support period:
- CDN links will remain active
- The AngularJS.org official website and all its relevant content will be online
- Read-only access to the code, issue, and pull request history on GitHub
- AngularJS npm packages will remain on npm and bower (marked as deprecated)
If you require a custom development team to take care of your migration from AngularJS to Angular or React, we are here to help. Check out Custom Development
What is Angular and why is it better?
Angular is a development platform and successor to AngularJS. It is built on TypeScript and is better in almost every possible way.
Even Though they share a name, Angular is still quite different from AngularJS. This makes migration not as easy as some would expect. However, here are — reasons why you should still make the leap:
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Architecture
AngularJS uses model-view-controller (MVC) while Angular uses component-based architecture. The latter is excellent for building dynamic user interfaces for applications as it uses independent components and directives.
Controller-based architecture puts all framework features into a single class rather than filtering it into various development layers (MVC), making the development process much more efficient.
Language
Angular uses a TypeScript language, which is superset of JavaScript. It is consistent, flexible, and benefits from a type-checking feature that reduces run-time errors. As an object-oriented language, TypeScript writes cleaner code and is easier to reuse.
AngularJS, as its name suggests, uses JavaScript. It is still a competent language and widely used but lacks many aforementioned features.
Mobile Support
As mentioned previously, AngularJS lacks the same amount of mobile capability that its successor has and thus, becomes redundant for development for a vast majority of the internet populace. Angular works on almost every mobile device and browser and can even be used to develop native mobile apps using tools like CapacitorJS.
Tooling Support
Another area where Angular excels is by limiting the use of 3rd party tools such as IDE or Webstorm, by providing a Command-Line-Interface (CLI). This reduces time spent developing applications by helping projects incorporate Angular entities and objects.
Efficient development
By having superior architecture, language, and support, Angular ensures efficient and faster development with much lesser cost when compared to AngularJS. This is especially true when developing larger applications.
Developers find it easier to work with Angular. With the help of modules, maintenance and updates are easier where they can swap one module of code with another instead of updating the entire code.
Migrating to Angular from AngularJS
Migrating from Angular to AngularJS is not a one-step process. While the upgrade process will have a huge positive impact on your business, errors and downtime can be detrimental. It would help if you had a detailed migration plan underlying all the requirements, goals, personnel, and technologies. You can also look for external help if you are not confident about migrating yourself.
Armia’s dedicated development team can help you migrate from Angular to AngularJS. Depending on age, complexity, and requirements, we can either rewrite the application or update it with hybrid ‘ngUpgrade’ or use Angular elements.
Though not comprehensive, here is an overview of the AngularJS to Angular migration process:
- Moving to TypeScript: Make the transition from JavaScript to TypeScript. This is done through the @types/angular package. It should be interoperable with JavaScript and this can be made possible by TypeScript Compiler & TypeScript module integration.
- Set up a New Build: Create a new build for your legacy project using Angular CLI. Some people use Webpack, but it is redundant as CLI already supports Webpack internally. The features are immediately connected when transferring the AngularJS files to a new folder in Angular.
- ngUpgrade Toolkit: Use this toolkit to construct a hybrid update and run two frameworks of the same application at the same time This simplifies the migrating process.
- Transfer components: You can make the Angular component available within the AngularJS part of the project by using the ‘degrade components’ feature. For proper set-up, you may need to modify some code as well.
- Utilize UI-Router: UI Routing is done at the final stage of the migration process. It is available in ngUpgrade by default.
