In the Angular world, there are always conferences organized by the community (ngComunity). Recently another Angular conference has just finished and it was amazing. The event is titled AngularConnect and is the biggest Angular event in Europe, hosted every year in London. You can find the list for all the Angular events here.

This event took place within 2 days and was composed of almost 50 sessions with various topics and technologies. The level of complexity of the sessions and topics varied in such a way that everyone had a chance of finding something of interest at this event.

To make it easier these were divided into four major categories:

• Main talks
• Mini-Workshops
• Office Hours
• Q&A Panels

If you want to take a look at all the sessions, here is a link where you can find them.

Besides these sessions, there were several very exciting workshops organized on the most important Angular topics. I had the opportunity to participate in one of these, named “Unit Testing Angular like a Boss”. It was a very strong and interactive presentation with several practical examples and tasks.
 

At this workshop, I found out new stuff and also some answers to the most complicated issues which I have dealt with in the past while working on projects. In other words, if you have the opportunity to attend one of the workshops from Angular events, do it. For the full list of workshops access this link.

The future of Angular and Angular Ivy

As it is custom with these conferences the keynotes talk about the future of Angular. During this talks, the current development state of the framework is presented and with it the teams that work on improving it. This event was no exception, it covered the features and final scopes which should be met in Angular’s next versions.
 

At this moment the main focus of the Angular teams is on refactoring and optimizing the compiled version of the app. The main goal of their work is to reduce the size of the compiled application in order for the simplest app to have about the 4KB.

In order to reach this performance, teams are now working on another compiler called Ivy. The Ivy compiler is Angular's newest rendering pipeline and view engine. What does that mean, though? To put it simply, Angular's view engine takes the templates and components we've written and translated them into regular HTML and JavaScript that the browser can read and display. This means, for example, that your template variables and data bindings get rendered to the page with correct data.

Ivy is going to be the third incarnation of this engine for Angular 2+. First, there was the original compiler (which was not referred to as a view engine). Then, for version 4, the team introduced the view engine, referred to as "renderer2." Ivy is next in line. Ivy is going to be smaller, faster, a simpler.

The answer to the most asked question “What features will there be in Angular 8?”, was given by Igor Minar, Angular Team Lead, which said: “There will only be one feature :)), and this feature is Angular Ivy. This is because a lot of work  and time went into it and there is still some more to go, but this feature will improve the new level of performance.”

Unit testing and TDD

From all the topics that were discussed at this conference, the Testing subject has been in the spotlight. Some of the sessions which were related to this topic:

• Testing Angular with cypress.io
• Angular testing in TDD
• White-labeling & A/B testing with interchangeable components
• Etc.

These sessions describe the importance of Unit testing and the way to implement this functionality.

From all of these, the best presentation on this topic, in my opinion, was presented by Shai Reznik with the title: “Angular Testing In TDD - Writing a Feature Guided By a Responsible Maniac”. This course was very amazing not only from a technical perspective but it was also very entertaining. In its own style to do the presentation like a show, Shai combined the technical theory with a lot of jokes. He explains with very clear practical examples the way to implement the TDD (Test driven development) process into a real Angular application.
The main idea that the whole presentation supported is that every improvement or change needs to start with writing a test. And after that based on the test, it needs to implement the new feature.

This method of work can be described as a process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle: first the developer writes an (initially failing) automated test case that defines a desired improvement or new function, then produces the minimum amount of code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards.
The following sequence of steps is generally followed:

• Add a test
• Run all tests and see if the new one fails
• Write some code
• Run tests
• Refactor code
• Repeat

Instead of a conclusion… See you at AngularConnect 2019

Overall this event was very well organized and it was a success. Which confirmed yet again the idea that the Angular framework is growing rapidly and with big steps and that currently, it is the best Web platform ever!!!!
All the presentation are available on the Youtube channel.
At the end of this blog, I can tell you for sure that we'll see you next year at AngularConnect 2019 also in London.

Sources:

https://angularconnect.com
https://angular.io/
https://technologyconversations.com/2013/12/20/test-driven-development-t...
https://www.telerik.com/blogs/first-look-angular-ivy