Angular has a large community of developers who constantly request new functionalities and features from the Angular team at Google. In Nov of last year — 2021, the angular team released the latest v13 of their open-source framework for web app development. We have already discussed what’s new in v13 and why it’s best for enterprise web frontends.

I have already seen many enterprises shifting from their old web frontend based out of Angular and other technologies to a more advanced v13 version of Angular.

However, Angular is not going to stop here only. As per their release policy, Angular will keep releasing the major updates every 6 months. So, from this, we can conclude that Angular will come up with the next big release in May of 2022. Before we peek into Angular 14 and what’s expected out of it, let’s quickly recap what is Angular.

What is Angular?

Developed by Google, Angular is an open-source JavaScript-based framework to develop single-page to high-level enterprise and complex gaming applications. In my past blogs, I have compared Angular with Vue and Angular with React.

As of Dec 2021, Angular holds a 22.96% market share for the most used web frameworks among developers across the world. It uses standard JavaScript syntax to write code. Also, it allows developers to use directives to create reusable components for more flexibility.

Some of the top features of Angular include:

• The framework uses the HTML template language that’s easy to learn and use.
• It’s based on MVC architecture which helps organize the code more logically.
• It has built-in data binding and routing that make web development much easier.
• Angular is a versatile framework and can be used accordingly based on the project size.

The Angular v13 version was more of an evolutionary update from Google. However, it didn’t get as much hype as it should have. But Angular 14 is getting a lot of buzzes around even before being released. It’s expected to be nothing less than a revolutionary upgrade in the web development industry.

Here are big things expected out of Angular 14:

Big Upgrades Expected Out of Angular 14

The team at Angular periodically shares a roadmap of what can be expected out of the next release. They wait for the community to respond and collect the feedback to combine it with internal features developed by their team to release the major version. Let’s peek into what’s expected out of v14:

Better Typing @angular/forms

This likely upgrade in Angular 14 will impact the reactive forms types model. It’ll make type checking much more easier and flexible than ever before. Angular is aiming to implement a type of system that’ll be compatible with other Angular versions. Doing so won’t cause a regression.

This will allow developers to find errors during the development phase and save a significant amount of time.

Independent Components from Models

There’s only one framework where components are not ‘Units of Reuse”. And it’s obviously Angular. The framework is built around Modules, which act as units of reuse. For instance, Angular libraries publish NgModules or NgModule. It is a module for lazy loading.

This doesn’t allow the use of directives, pipes, and even the components outside the scope of modules. Since the modules are building blocks in Angular, it limits the development experience.

Thus, an effort will be made to separate the components from modules. Due to the change in architecture, components, directives, and pipes will become central to the framework. This will allow developers to import components, directives, and pipes to use directly.

Micro Frontend Architecture for Scalable development

Another big or say biggest upgrade Angular 14 will likely pack is the Micro Frontend Architecture. The angular team is looking towards independent deployability and the development of large-scale applications. Through Micro Frontend Architecture, they plan to improve the efficiency and productivity of the framework.

Angular has already stated that the community has an established plan to support micro frontends. However, they are currently in investigation mode to figure out what would be the correct abstraction to offer the support. So, we can conclude that the micro frontend is coming maybe with v14 or maybe with the version after that. But it’ll surely be here soon.

Angular Material Enhancements by Integration of MDC Web

The Google material design team created the MDC web library that offers to reuse the primitives for building components utilizing Material Design. Now, the Angular team is all set to bring these primitives to the Angular Material for material design.

This will enable the Angular material to align with the MDC web designs more closely. Thanks to this Material Design Specification, you can expand accessibility, improve component quality, and improve Angular’s internal team’s velocity.

Other Important changes likely to be part of the next big releases are:

• After the shift to Ivy, Angular is likely to remove the legacy View Engine for reduced Angular conceptual overhead, small package size, low maintenance cost, and complexity.
• Advanced compiler diagnostics to extend the diagnostics of the Angular compiler outside the type checking.
• Other correctness and conformance checks are likely to be introduced to further the correctness guarantee.
• The angular team is working on moving the codebase to the angular/angular monorepository to improve the integration of Angular DevTools with the framework.

Final Words

One thing from this expected Angular 14 is that the performance of Angular is going to revamp. From the looks of it, Angular 14 will pack a lot of punch into it. However, the thing to keep an eye on is the Micro Frontend update. I am not sure, will it be a part of v14 or any other subsequent release after that. Still, I’m hopeful that one day Angular will become much more capable of doing things not even expected from it today.