ng-conf, the original AngularJS conference just took place last week in Salt Lake City, Utah on March 5-6. While none of us here at Scotch attended (we'll be at ng-vegas!), the livestream was incredibly informative and fun to watch.

Definitely take a look at the Day 1 keynote by Igor Minar and Brad Green and the Day 2 keynote by Misko Hevery and Rado Kirov.

Here are the bullet points of our favorite news for those that didn't take a peek at the conference presentations on YouTube.

Angular has a new website!

Built on Angular to show off Angular, the new site (angular.io) has a clean material design and is fully focused on Angular 2.

The Angular site we know currently (angularjs.org) will live on for Angular 1.x.

The community is amazing

The growth of the Angular community has been immense. Last month, there were 964k active users on angularjs.org and about 100,000 people connected with the Angular team on GitHub.

Angular 1 is still being developed

A 1.4 release candidate is coming this week. There are also plans for 1.5 and 1.6 after that. These updates will server to make Angular 1.x even better and faster than it already is.

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More importantly, these new versions will help pave the path to Angular 2.

Angular 1.4 RC0 this week

Angular 1.4 will have:

~30% faster digest times vs 1.3

2-4% memory footprint improvement

Performance improvements varies depending on browser/application

There is an upgrade path from Angular 1 to 2

There are actually two upgrade paths dubbed Big Bang and Incremental.

Big Bang is where you stop development in Angular 1 and work on building your entire app in Angular 2. This is the upgrade path people were expecting to take since the differences were so large between the versions.

Incremental is the interesting upgrade path. This requires you load both Angular 1 and Angular 2 libraries. Along with the new router, you'll be able to take bits and pieces of your application and migrate them. This way, you can move through your application piece by piece. There is also the option to switch out the overarching controller for your application and work from the top down.

Here are two very informative videos to watch; one is on migrating 1.3 to 2.0 and the other is on Angular 2 syntax by Misko Hevery, the father of Angular.

ngModelOptions is cool

Great quick 5 minute talk by Kent C. Dodds over at Egghead.io about ngModelOptions.

With ngModelOptions you have the ability to trigger a model update at set times or on set actions. Watch the 5 minute video:

There's a new Angular router in town

The router is one of my favorite parts of any application. We've written about the current routing situations ngRoute, UI-Router, and have built a multi-step form. Soon be writing about the new Angular router.

The new router is:

Component based

Compatible with Angular 2 and Angular 1

We'll write more on the new router soon, but the main feature is that it is component based where ngRoute and UI-Router were URL and state based respectively. Here's Brian Ford, the developer working on the new router talking about the new features:

Having this new router component based helps us bridge the gap between Angular 1 applications and Angular 2 applications that rely on Web Components.

Angular 2 will have all the features you know

It's no secret that Angular 2 will have some big changes as far as syntax and how we build our applications in comparison to Angular 1. This is just the nature of the beast since Angular was started all the way back in 2010 when the JavaScript landscape was very different than it is now.

Angular 1 filled a lot of the gaps in JavaScript to make it as magical as it is, but with ES6 gaining momentum, Angular 2 will be able to take advantage of some great features and keep the framework lean and forward-thinking. Even with the major changes however, Angular 2 will still have the concepts familiar to us from Angular 1:

Dependency injection

Data binding

Directives

Routers

Filters

Animation

Accessibility

i18n

Forms

Expressions

Material Design

Protractor

Karma

Mocks

We'll also get new features

Viewports

New languages

Web Components

New template syntax (sounds scary at first, we know!)

Unidirectional data flow

Ultra-fast change detection

Angular 2 will come with a style guide

John Papa and Todd Motto, both of which have their own very popular respective style guides for Angular 1.x applications have come together with the community and Angular team members to create a style guide for Angular 2 applications. This keeps developers in line and not having to wander around creating their own best practices.

Angular 2 syntax is actually easier to learn than 1.x

Scared of the big syntax changes coming in Angular 2? Don't be. There is actually less to remember and the design and syntax choices make a bunch of sense. The day 2 keynote by Misko clears up much of the new syntax and explains why the choices were made.

Angular 2 is fast

Immutable data structures help speed up the change detection for large amounts of data.

Angular 2's change detection is able to take advantage of immutable data structs for huge perf wins pic.twitter.com/uhtHXkU5dL — Brian Ford (@briantford) March 5, 2015

The blue line is Angular 1. The red is Angular 2. The yellow is Angular 2 with immutable data structures. The speed of your application won't slow down just because you have more data!

Angular will also be more memory efficient, especially when showing views that have already been rendered:

AtScript is now TypeScript

AtScript was created at Google to give our JavaScript a little bit more "syntactical sugar". It helps to make syntax and how we write our applications make a little more sense and that keeps us more sane. The big features were:

Type annotations

Field annotations

Metadata annotations

Type Introspection with Annotation Support

The Angular team worked closely with the TypeScript team and as of TypeScript 1.5, the above features will be added. There has been a lot of working amongst the Angular and external teams like Microsoft's TypeScript and work with Ember and their router. This is always an awesome thing to see developers banding together for a common goal.

Firebase's AngularFire 1.0 is out

Firebase, now part of Google, is a tool that helps build real-time JavaScript applications easily. AngularFire, the Angular module used to connect Angular to Firebase has been upgraded to 1.0 and with it comes the cool feature of having your application SEO friendly!

Conclusion

Honorable mention is this great talk by Shai Reznik. He pokes fun at the Angular team for some of their naming conventions (naming a filter... "filter"?!) and it's a fun watch if you have the time.

ng-conf brought a lot of great new information to the table and brought much relief to the many Angular developers that were scared the new version would be a complete breaking change.

With great announcements like:

Angular 1 still in constant development

A new router to help bridge the gap to Angular 2

An upgrade path to Angular 2

ES6, Dart, and TypeScript support

Incredible speed improvements

A new website

There was plenty to chew on from ng-conf and it will be a very fun year for Angular developers!

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