In the keynote session of AngularConnect in London, Brad Green gave attendees a status update on the Angular 2 project. There is still no release date, but a beta is just around the corner.

Green started the keynote by reassuring developers of Google's commitment to Angular 1. At a previous conference, he said that they would gauge where to spend their time based on traffic to the Angular 1 website vs. the Angular 2 website. For now, 93% of the traffic is still on Angular 1, though the remaining 7% surprised him. Speaking about the use of Angular within Google, "We are going to be on Angular 1 for some time, even though we've just started to adopt Angular 2 internally," said Green. Driving the point home, he also mentioned that there have been 32 Angular 1 releases so far this year.

Moving on to Angular 2, the server-side rendering feature of Angular now has a name. Dubbed "Angular Universal", it executes the first page of your app on the server and sends back HTML and CSS. Jeff Whelpley and Patrick Stapleton will demo the new feature in a session later today. Developers can check out the current work on GitHub.

Igor Minar took the stage to demonstrate a new tool called angular-cli. It's based on the ember-cli project and allows developers to use the command line to scaffold pieces of an application. For example:

ng new my-app // Scaffold an application, including HTML and TypeScript ng serve // Create a development web server that hooks into the dev process ng generate component my-component // Creates a new component

Other companies stopped by to show some of the products they're building on Angular 2. The Ionic team announced that Ionic 2, built with Angular 2, is now a public alpha. Telerik demonstrated Angular 2's ability to work with non-HTML templates, showcasing a native mobile app that uses Angular 2 and NativeScript in concert. Uri Goldshtein from Meteor dropped by to feature Angular 2's Rendering Speed.

Following up on the recent announcement of ng-upgrade, Misko Hevery provided a sample app to demonstrate its use, combining Angular 1 and Angular 2 in the same app.

A new Angular team member, Jules Kremer, made an important announcement to attendees. Before, the team said that they would only support "evergreen" browsers (Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari). But, thanks to work in the community, browser support how now been extended all the way back to IE 9.

Green wrapped up the keynote with an update on the release date:

We really wanted to come up here and say "we're at beta"; we're not quite there. But, we're really close. [For beta], there's just a couple more things we want to do. We want to finish the docs and there's some P1 issues -- there's about 50 of them -- we want to burn down before we tell you, "The water's completely safe, come on in"

The AngularConnect conference runs today and tomorrow. The sessions are streaming live and will be available for viewing individual soon. The keynote slides are available now.