So, when I heard the first time about Angular 4 my first question was: “Where is the third version?”. For me, it’s really interesting to speak about this news from Angular Team. So let’s start.

When did it happen?

8-9th of December 2016 was the first Angular Team conference in Belgium where Angular Team announced that release of Angular 4 will be in March 2017.

Semantic versioning

Need to tell about versioning at first. After Angular 2 announcement on September 2016, Angular Team was started supporting semantic versioning — SEMVER. Semantic version contains three numbers:

Patch number is increased when you are fixing a bug and releasing new version of product

number is increased when you are fixing a bug and releasing new version of product Minor number is increased when you are adding new functionality to your product

number is increased when you are adding new functionality to your product Major number is increased when you are publishing new version with critical/breaking changes that break old code

The Angular team published for now 2 major versions. As we remember moving from 1.x version to 2.x version required to rewrite all project code. But Angular Team assures us that moving from 2nd version to 4, 5, … will require rewriting just some of modules that take breaking changes regarding SEMVER. Also, Team will add Deprecation phrases to inform developers about critical changes on separate modules that help developers to move into new functionality intime.

Now just “Angular”?

The term “Angular 2” will become obsolete after 4 version is released. After you should say just “Angular” without any version. Also you should avoid packages with prefixes ng2- or angular2-. There is a single resource with the documentation — angular.io with the official community on GitHub.

Where’s the third version?

The reason for this angular core package — @angular/router version. Unlike its neighbors it’s major version now is 3.

For strong semantic versioning of angular core packages, Angular Team decides to use one version for all packages.

Tentative schedule of releases under version 4:

Tentative timetable for future editions:

More detailed information available on official Angular blog.

Thanks for reading.