14 DAY TRIAL // Google has just released version 1.5.0 of its AngularJS JavaScript framework, and as the team announced earlier in 2015, this release will focus on smoothing out the differences between Angular 1.x and 2.x.
"The primary theme for this release was to improve the upgrade path to Angular 2," said Pete Bacon Darwin, AngularJS team member, in Google's Angular 1.5 announcement.
Google initially planned to abandon Angular 1 and just move on with Angular 2, but the company underestimated the framework's success, and backlash from the development community forced it to rethink its original strategy.
Eventually, the dev team ended up dedicating quite a serious amount of time to putting together a way to move Angular 1.x coders to the new Angular 2.x syntax that's incompatible with the old one.
Besides having provided an Angular 1.x to Angular 2.x migration guide last fall, the company also officially dedicated itself to releasing the 1.5.x branch, which slowly blended some of AngularJS' 2.x principles into Angular 1.x to get developers acquainted to how things will work in version 2.x.
So if developers want to get an early start with migrating their Angular apps from 1.x to 2.x, they can start by implementing the intermediary 1.5.x branch first.
In other JavaScript news...
During the past week, the Google team has announced Chrome 49 Beta, which contains a bunch of new ES6 (ECMAScript 2015) features. Chrome now covers 91% of the latest version of the JavaScript standard.
A week ago, the OpenSSL project announced an urgent update to fix issues that allowed attackers to break encrypted traffic. After the Node.js team analyzed the impact of these issues, they said that Node.js and its users weren't in any immediate danger, and they scheduled a security update for February 9.
Remember when we were all psyched about the upcoming release of npm 3.x that had those cool-looking progress bars? Apparently, they are slowing developers down because they increased total installation time. Fortunately, someone figured this out and found a way to disable them.