Technology Archives - Page 13 of 14

Angular, the TypeScript-based, JavaScript-compiled, Google-developed framework, has been prevalent in the software industry since 2009. Over time, this framework has proved highly efficient for developing intuitive and dynamic applications as required by diverse industrial sectors. Consequently, most businesses these days prefer Angular for app development. As such, increasing demand for Angularjs app development services has been observed globally. And this is obvious because, since the inception of Angular, it has come a long way releasing several advanced versions successfully in quick progression. AngularJS is known to be its first version and later, Angular 2, Angular 4, Angular 5, Angular 6, Angular 8, and Angular 9 were released. Recently, on 24 June 2020, its latest version- Angular 10 was released in the market. So let us explore this update in detail.

Angular 10 and its Value Offerings

Angular 10 update looks quite smaller than its previous versions but is an effective attempt of the Angular team to keep this framework relevant and up-to-date. This time, they have emphasized more on improving quality, ecosystem, and tools rather than new features. Every Angular App Development Company must be well versed with the top updates of this version. The noteworthy updates are as follows:

CommonJS import Warnings

CommonJS was originally meant for designing the server-side modules and not for reducing the production package size. When the AngularJS app developers make use of dependencies bundled with CommonJS, it results in larger code bundles and ultimately slow performing applications. But after this update, the developers will automatically be notified in case a CommonJS module pulls into your build.

New Date Range Picker

The new date range picker is another update in the Angular UI Material component library. The components mat date input range and mat date picker range can be used for using this range picker.

Optional Stricter Settings

Angular 10 comes with a stricter project set-up for the creation of a new workspace using “ng new”. Activating the flag- “ng new-strict” can initialize the new project just with a few settings. These settings enhance maintainability, enable the CLI to optimize the app functions in an advanced manner, and also help to identify the bugs well ahead of time. Also, the “strict” flag reduces default bundle budgets by up to 75%, changes template type checking to Strict, it selects strict mode in TypeScript, allows advanced tree-shaking to configure the app as free of side-effects, preventing declarations of type any by configuring linting rules.

Updates in JS Ecosystem

The Angular team has made a few modifications for keeping the framework synchronized and up-to-date with the JavaScript Ecosystem. For instance, TypeScript is updated to TypeScript 3.9, the static analysis tool for TypeScript- TSLint has been updated to v6, and the runtime library for TypeScript- TSLib has been updated to v2.0. They have also upgraded the project layout. There is an additional tsconfig.base.json file as well which provides enhanced support to the way build tooling and IDEs resolve type and package configurations. Due to these updates, every AngularJS app development company can leverage these functionalities to the fullest for architecting responsive, user-friendly, and customizable apps and other software projects.

Bugs Resolutions

The Angular team has focused more on problem-solving during this update. They have worked with the community and made bigger contributions this time as about 700 issues were completely resolved considering the overall framework components and tools. The issues of ranges in the parser, Terser Inlining Bug, errors created due to migration when the symbol does not exist, etc. were fixed. Additionally, 2,000 more issues were touched.

Advanced browser Configurations

Browser configurations of Angular have been updated so that the new projects can exclude less used as well as older browsers like Internet Explorer 9, 10, Internet Explorer Web, etc. The Angular app developers can add the browsers that need to be supported in the .browserslistrc file, for enabling ES5 builds and differential loading for browsers.

Some Deprecations

In Angular 10, several unimportant sections have been removed. For example, the Angular Package Format doesn’t include FESM5 or ESM5 bundles anymore. This saves about 119MB of install- and download- time, while running yarn or npm install for the libraries and packages in Angular. Since any down-levelling for supporting the ES5 is performed at the end of the build process, these formats aren’t needed any longer.

Also, WrappedValue is deprecated. Probably, it will be removed in v12. WrappedValue was useful for triggering change detection even if the same object instance was emitted or produced. When WrappedValue is utilized, there is a performance cost and this functionality is useful in relatively rare cases. As a result, the Angular team may have decided to drop it.

Additional Features and Updates

The team has added a program-based entry-point finder- EntryPointFinder in Angular version 10. This is supposedly faster than DirectoryWalkerEntryPointFinder.
A compiler interface has been introduced during this update that covers the actual ngtsc compiler. With the use of the project interface, the language service-specific compiler can manage several Typecheck files while also building Scriptinfos as needed.
In Angular 10, the team has removed Autocompletion from HTML entities like &amp, due to certain performance issues and problematic value.
It is now possible to configure Async locking timeouts which adds support for the ngcc.config.js file. This sets the retryDelay and retryAttempts options for the AsyncLocker.
The team has also made type-checking performance enhancements to the compiler-CLI.
Angular version 10 supports the merging of several translation files. Before this version, only a single translation file was permitted per locale. Now it is possible to specify multiple files per locale for the users and with the help of messaging ID, the transactions from every file will be merged.
For performance improvement, the Angular team has made computation of basePaths lazy, so, the work will be performed in TargetedEntryPointFinder only if required. Before this version, the basePaths got computed as and when the finder got instantiated even though the entry-point was already processed. This was a waste of effort which has now been handled.
Urlmatcher’s type now indicates clearly that it can always return null.
Improved performance due to a decrease in the size of the entrypoint manifest and implementing a caching technique in the manifest.

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Final Verdict:

With incredible features, some removals, and some modifications, Angular has enriched itself and become all the more powerful. Owing to features like data linking, reusing of web elements, tooling, etc. along with Google’s vibrant community support, the popularity of angularjs web app development and angularjs mobile app development has exponentially risen.

With this, we come to the end of our topic. We hope this blog was knowledgeable and helpful to you!

React Native, ‘the minimalistic JavaScript framework’, was actually discovered as a side-project while working on ‘React.js’- Facebook’s another important project. The principal motive behind React Native’s discovery was to find a comprehensive solution for creating cross-platform applications with native properties.

But surprisingly, this framework became way more popular than anyone thought, despite having some flaws. To make it more powerful, it was strongly backed by the huge open-source community of Facebook. Also, in the year 2018, the Facebook team announced the re-architecture of this framework for addressing all the existing issues faced by engineers during React Native development. Today, the React Native framework has become one of the most preferred choices of developers for creating modern-day SPAs and mobile apps.

React Native is still progressing and a host of React Native development companies have emerged across the globe, due to a massive demand for this framework.

So what’s new in React Native in 2020? Well, the framework is about to release its new architecture in the market. In this article, we will have a glimpse at React Native’s enhancements in 2019, the basic React Native architecture, and its new update in 2020.

Highlights of the React Native in 2019

In 2019, React Native introduced several versions with some amazing modifications and tools for React native development. Let’s explore them.

Updates in Version 0.60

For speeding up the development of the repositories, the team moved the main packages to distinct repositories
The start screen was modified and made more informative
Android X was introduced. Facebook also released a JavaScript engine which was optimized for React Native, Hermes. Hermes enables Android apps to use lesser memory, faster launching and apps are much lighter in size.
The helper was updated too after a long time
Auto-linking of the native modules, another new feature was introduced
CocoaPods were merged as a section of the React Native IOS project

Updates in Version 0.61

The hot-reloading and live-reloading features were replaced by the well-functional Fast Refresh feature.
Another significant feature- React Native doctor was launched in this version which ensures that migrations and updates become hassle-free.

Updates in Version 0.62

The team announced that Flipper, a feature that enhances the debugging of mobile apps in both- Android and iOS, will be introduced.

Overview of The Old React Native Architecture

Main objective of this framework is to help React Native developers to write JavaScript React code so that UI can be displayed correctly at the same time developer can access the native capabilities in the app. Mechanism for Android/iOS ecosystem typically looks like this:

There are 3 threads running in parallel in the React Native apps like JS thread, Native thread and, Shadow thread.

JS Thread is where the code of JavaScript is read fully and then compiled. Here the business logic of the app also resides.

Shadow Thread does the layout calculation. It makes use of Facebook’s layout engine named Yoga for calculating flexbox layout and then sends this information to the UI thread.

Native Thread does handling of the user interface. When the app needs to access native capabilities or UI needs to be updated, communication takes place between this thread and JS thread.

In this older architecture, C++ Module Bridge had to be used to make the communication possible between JS thread and Native. Every time data received from JS thread or Native had to serialized as JSON and then had to be sent to the queue and then after arrival had to be decoded. Due to the bridge that is being used for communication, there was an inherent delay in the synchronization between the native and JS code.

Highlights of Re-architectured React Native Framework in 2020

To address some of the existing issues related to the bridge in React Native, Facebook has taken the important step of going for a revamp in the architecture of this framework. There will be enhancements done in some of the React Native Modules. For instance, a Type-safety feature would be introduced for improved safety between JavaScript and Native-side code. There will be default lazy initialization of Native Modules for faster startup. Also, there will be the implementation of a new thread-safe of the React Native UI layer. It will help in better native interoperability, faster startup, elevated UX of core components, etc.

Another update will focus on a new set of APIs for the initialization of React Native. It will be dependent on the new native module system and the new renderer. The overall aim is the improvement of the startup time.

JavaScript Interface- JSI will be another important update that will be useful during native development. For this, the Bridge feature will be deprecated gradually. JSI act as an enabler for TurboModules and Fabric. Now, the JS bundle can make use of any JavaScript engine and is not limited to just JSC. The JSC engine can be replaced with a JS engine like V8 for instance.

JSI helps in the following:

In loading JS bundle
calling functions between JS and C++, creating JS runtime
for creating and accessing JavaScript objects from C++

Also, JS can now hold the reference to C++ Host Objects and call methods on them with the use of JSI. This will ensure that the Native and JavaScript realms will be aware of each other. So we can say that complete interoperability will be possible between all threads. Also, React Native developers will now be able to handle very large panels of systems.

A concept of shared ownership is being introduced in this new architecture which allows the JS code to directly communicate with the native code from the JS thread. So the serializing to JSON the messages won’t be required to pass across and all the asynchronous issues, congestion, etc. on the bridge would be removed.

This new React Native app architecture also allows better control over native modules as developers can use native modules when the need arises instead of loading all of them at the start-up level. Consequently, there is a huge performance improvement during the start-up phase.

Do you want to design a modern-day React Native app for your next project?

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Final Words:

Since its inception, React Native has accumulated several features and functionalities that have become redundant today. So, to match the needs of next-gen apps, and other software products, the framework is cleaning away the unnecessary and outdated sections. This new architecture is an attempt to make the React Native development services highly efficient to create performant apps. Some features have even been replaced by their advanced counterparts. The core modules like AsyncStorage and Webview have been gradually removed and changed into the community managed repositories.

Besides this update, the React Native developer tools will make the development process much easier and impactful. All this is going to help the React Native developers a big time in improving the overall work-flow, time-frames, development process, predictability, reliability, and much more.

The re-architecture of React Native is expected to get completed in the coming few years and the future of this technology definitely looks bright.

We hope this blog provided you with some useful insights.

Do share your thoughts on this in the comments section.

We would love to hear from you.

Technology, Page 13 Category

Angular 10- Top Features and Modifications that You Must Know!