Angular 4 coming up next

I believe, the readers of this article are well versed or educated of Angular basics and also have hands-on experience.

There have several versions of Angular been already released including (BETA, Release Candidate, and Final version). If you are more interested to read about the previous versions of Angular, I would recommend the following official links:

https://angularjs.org/  - For Angular 1.x versions

https://angular.io/       - For Angular 2.x and later versions

https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md - github repository having every release/ update details

Please note: Google intentionally has not chosen the next version as “Angular 3” instead it will be “Angular 4” which is supposed to be launch its final version in March 2017. Angular is getting more mature with its new versions.  

Angular 4 release candidate 2 (rc.2) version has also released. Here is the screenshot of the changes in the latest release candidate (rc.2) of Angular 4:

Angular Release Almanac

Google has a tentative plan to release Angular 4 in the month of March 2017. 

Source: https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/docs/RELEASE_SCHEDULE.md

 

According to Igor Minar, Angular plans to have major releases every 6 months with minimal breaking changes. This seems like a pretty feasible plan, unless another mistake is done with the naming of the packages like it happened for the router package. He quotes “Let's not call it AngularJS, let's not call it Angular 2," he said, "because as we are releasing more and more of these versions. It's going to be super confusing for everybody.”

The Angular team announced that they will be using SEMVER when releasing updates.

SEMVER

SEMVER is abbreviation of Semantic Versioning. It is all about to make meaningful version number of releases. You may look at the following table for better understanding:

Angular team has strategically aligned each semantic with tentative timeline. For instance:

1.       Patch: this version to be released every week exception of holidays.

2.       Minor: this version to be released every month.

3.       Major: this version to be released every six months meaning two releases every year.

You know switching from Angular 1.x to Angular 2.0 was a big-bang release. The concepts were dramatically changed but fortunately the next version 4.0.0 will be a smooth shift and a major version that will be backwards compatible with the previous release (version 2.x.x) for most developers, but might remove APIs that have been deprecated two major versions ago (6 or more months ago).

Starting with the 2.0.0 release of Angular, Angular team adopted the following development processes:

·         Use semantic versioning for signaling the content of Angular releases.

·         Moved to time-based release cycles so that you can plan ahead.

·         A deprecation policy so that you know how to get notified of API changes ahead of time.

·         Clarified the distinction between stable and experimental APIs.

·         Clarified the scope of Public API surface.

There would be certainly feature enhancements in version 4.0.0 which we can discuss here.

Upcoming Features

·         Backward compatibility (mentioned above as well)

·         Much smarter Angular compiler (ngc) for better error handling

·         Extra type safety

·         Better runtime speed and parse time and rest will come shortly

Tentative schedule after 4.0.0 final release in March 2017

Date	Stable Release	Compatibility*
September/October 2017	5.0.0	^4.0.0
March 2018	6.0.0	^5.0.0
September/October 2018	7.0.0	^6.0.0

I come up with more information as I’ll get it. Till than… Happy reading…

Abhishek Maitrey

twitter: @abhimaitrey