Angular 2 and the Problem with Exciting New Technology

Disclaimer: this post will contain technical jargon, so my non-techie readers, I recommend you skip this one.

As a JavaScript developer, my favorite working environment for the last 2+ years has been AngularJS -- a framework for building Single-Page Applications (SPAs).

Almost as long as I've known about AngularJS, I've known that while the current version is 1.x, the team has been working on Angular 2, which will include many breaking changes.  Well over the past two or three weeks, I've been working to make the transition to Angular 2 just in time for the new release.

And last Wednesday, it happened.  Angular 2 is officially out and this is anticipated to become the new standard for JavaScript single-page apps.

On the surface, it's extremely impressive and cool.  But it is vastly different.  I never could have guessed just how different it would be.  Angular 2 uses TypeScript (a superset of ES6) which is compiled to JavaScript, so I'm not touching the JavaScript directly.  It also makes for a wildly different paradigm shift in the way I think of components and directives (AngularJS terms).  It almost feels as if all of my experience with Angular 1.5 (and earlier versions) serves as a detriment to my understanding Angular 2.  I think perhaps a background in Java might actually have proved more useful than a background with Angular 1.

Further, because this is new technology, it is very difficult to find the correct answers to my questions when i search online.  I frequently underestimate just how much help I receive from the online community when I am doing my day-to-day job.  When working with a brand new framework like Angular 2, I run into errors that take me hours to solve when they might have only taken me a few minutes of google searching with an older framework.

Besides that, the developer tools haven't fully caught up either.  I use the chrome developer tools so often for testing things in the console and putting breakpoints in my code.  Now that I'm working with TypeScript, the tools don't work the same way or as effectively.  They're not entirely unhelpful, but they just weren't designed with TypeScript in mind.

I hope I'll come out of this as a strong Angular 2 and TypeScript developer.  I enjoy learning this challenging-but-exciting new framework.  But there is certainly that nagging part of me that wants very much for the community to catch up with the technology quickly so that more useful discussion can be had about Angular 2 and help all the people who are struggling with it like I am.

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