The Growing Case of Angular JS for the Mobile Web
Summarize With:
Angular JS, an open-source framework has gained a lot of traction in the world of web development today. This framework by Google has been seen as a viable choice even for responsive mobile web application development as it allows developers to create trendy applications easily. Considering that most applications today are data-driven, Angular JS fits comfortably into the developer's toolbox as it enables interaction of backend web services with external data sources. This framework allows developers to extend the HTML syntax to iterate the application components in a succinct manner while allowing the use of HTML as the main template language. This blog takes a look at some considerations that make Angular JS great for developing mobile web applications.
Reasons behind Angular JS perfect choice for Mobile Web Applications
- Responsiveness:
According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, Global mobile devices grew to 7.9 billion in 2015, up from 7.3 billion in 2014. According to this report, 'the typical smartphone generated 41 times more mobile data traffic (929 MB per month) than the typical basic-feature cell phone (which generated only 23 MB per month of mobile data traffic).' Clearly, developers now need to create web applications that will present themselves correctly on mobile devices. Since Angular JS is an open source JavaScript MVC framework it allows developers to create rich and responsive applications for both desktop and mobile environments using the same codebase. Additionally, these applications can be run on any HTML 5 compliant browser and mobile browsers. - Scalability and Maintainability:
Modern day web applications need a scalable architecture, so that upgrades, patches, and bug-fixes can be implemented easily. Angular JS is the perfect choice for building large and scalable applications. It features ng-class and ng-model directives, provides two-way data binding and allows developers save the data on the server in just a few lines. Applications built with Angular JS are also easily maintainable as it employs object-oriented design principles. Along with this, Angular JS allows developers to use both MVC or MVVM to separate presentation from business logic while boosting maintainability. - Mobile features:
A mobile web application has to ensure that all the application features display correctly across browsers. Angular JS has some awesome mobile components. Using frameworks such as Ionic or Mobile UI gives developers the flexibility to augment mobile components and offer rich user interfaces, overlays, sidebars, switches, swipe features, scrollable areas and top and bottom navigation bars that do not bounce on scrolling when the application is viewed on a mobile, as well as the option to provide push notifications and analytics.
These Angular JS frameworks utilize robust libraries (Mobile UI uses overthrow.js and fastclick.js) to provide a smooth mobile experience that is highly responsive and touch enabled. The two-way data binding capability ensures that when the framework experiences a browser change it updates the necessary patterns immediately thereby providing a uniform viewing experience.
As Angular JS uses reusable logic, it allows the reuse of web application logic on multiple devices across multiple platforms and at the same time also allows developers the flexibility to customize the UI for each platform. Developers thus can keep the functionality of the application separate for the UI of the application which helps in providing a uniform application experience. - Performance:
Performance is critical for mobile web applications as a slow application is almost worse than having no application. Angular JS takes great care of performance issues since it uses a declarative paradigm for creating patterns. Instead of describing all the steps needed to achieve an end result, Angular JS uses lightweight code where only the end result needs to be described. Angular JS also loads pages asynchronously which decrease the page load time, increases the speed of the application thereby boosting performance. - Dependency Injection:
Additionally, Angular JS allows developers to create applications combining separate modules that can be co-dependent or autonomous. It has a built-in dependencies implementation mechanism that enables it to independently identify situations where additional objects are needed, and simultaneously provides these and binds them thus making mobile application development much easier.
As Angular JS uses the MVC structure and separates data from logic components the dependency injection enables bringing server-side services to client-side web application which helps in reducing the burden on the server and also contributes to improved application performance. - Security:
To call a good application 'great', developers have to ensure that it has robust security features. Developers can optimize the security features of a responsive web application with Angular JS. It uses HTTPS interface, in the form of a simple web service or even a RESTful API, to communicate with servers. Angular JS also provides CSRF protection, supports strict expression evaluation and allows strict contextual escaping. Additionally, to increase or augment security features, especially for enterprise applications, Angular JS also developers implement supplemental libraries like Idapjs to implement single sign-on via interaction between libraries and AngularJS.
Along with the above-mentioned benefits, Angular JS also has huge and active community support. Getting started with Angular JS is also quite easy as it is not necessary to learn the entire framework to build an application. Angular JS is built with testing in mind and makes it easy to mock physical devices and situations such as GPS, blue tooth etc. This testing focus also makes test automation implementation much easier.
Conclusion
Given all these advantages Angular JS is being adopted incredibly fast by developers across the globe'this means more add-ons and high-quality libraries and additional support for Angular developers. Get set for more Angular JS in the mobile web!