14 DAY TRIAL // Jeff Whelpley and Patrick Stapleton, two well-known members of the AngularJS community, have carried out a survey on their peers, asking for opinions on how they intend to use Google's upcoming Angular 2.x framework.
Ever since Google announced that Angular 2 would be completely different from Angular 1, developers haven't been looking forward to the upgrade.
This slowly changed in the past months, though, when Angular's team announced that the 1.5.x branch would serve as an intermediary release between the 1.x and 2.x branches.
Additionally, just a week ago, the team also released a guide on how to migrate to the 2.x branch, along with a special library that allows developers to mix AngularJS 1.x and 2.x code in the same application.
Trying to get a grasp of how the community is currently looking at the 2.x branch after all these positive news, the two aforementioned Angular developers carried out a survey on a variety of Angular 2 topics.
TypeScript is the preferred transpiler
First off, back in June when we reported that the Angular team would allow developers to use any version of JavaScript they want with Angular 2, we thought this meant that most developers would stick with the standard ES5.
In the meantime, ES6 was announced as the official and most recent version of the JavaScript language, which completely turned things around.
Since ES6 is not yet supported in most Web browsers, this meant various types of transpilers (code-to-code converters) needed to be used to convert ES6 to ES5.
According to the survey, most developers will opt to use TypeScript with their AngularJS projects (45%), TypeScript being a JavaScript superset developed by Microsoft, one that supports many ES6 features, but outputs code in ES5.
Second on the list of preferences expressed in the survey answers is Babel (33%), which is today's most used transpiler, a tool that lets developers write JavaScript code in the ES6 standard and then converts it to regular ES5, the JS version which all browsers support.
The community is still split on the new features added to Angular 2
AngularJS 2 will also introduce a new template syntax, which, according to the survey, only 43.3% of users plan on using, the other 56.7% still going with AngularJS 1's former syntax.
On the other hand, the new routing mechanism that will be added to Angular 1.5 and 2.0, dubbed the Component Router, is quite popular, 36.7% of all respondents saying they'll use it in upcoming projects, compared to 33% that said they'll use to older one (UI Router).
The same split across the middle can be seen for another of Angular 2's new features, its server-side rendering support, which only 27.2% of developers plan on using. On this topic, 25.7% said they don't plan to use this feature at all, 25.9% said they would use it sometimes, and 21.2% were undecided.
You can view the rest of the survey results in our photo gallery, or you can go to the official AngularJS blog, where they have also been published.
