Google releases first beta of its much-awaited JS framework

Dec 15, 2015 22:03 GMT  ·  By

After more than a year of internal development inside Google's offices, the much-awaited AngularJS 2.x branch is almost here, with the dev team announcing the availability of the first AngularJS 2.0 Beta version.

AngularJS, one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks around, has become a developer favorite for almost any new, modern, mobile-first website, and even mobile application.

After the 1.x branch had achieved a level of popularity that had finally managed to overtake even the venerable jQuery framework, Google's devs announced version 2.x, but with a twist. It would be incompatible with 1.x and cause lots of breaking changes.

During the past year, following intense criticism and threats from the developer community, the Google team had a change of heart and eventually worked on a way for developers to smoothly migrate their AngularJS 1.x apps to 2.x, even allowing both codebases to co-exist in the same apps.

Angular 2.0 Alpha was successfully tested inside AdWords

According to the AngularJS devs, the 2.x branch, which was set for release during October-November but got delayed, is one step closer to its final version.

Starting today, AngularJS 2.0 Beta is available for download on the project's GitHub account, and developers can start coding their first applications right away.

Even if a beta release, Google developers say that alpha versions of AngularJS were used inside Google products like AdWords, Google Fiber, and GreenTea (internal CRM application), and fared very well. Actually, the new Google Fiber website is made with Angular 2.

Besides small bug fixes, which will inevitably follow, the team has also started working on cutting down the framework's size even more, adding better support for animations, internationalization (i18n), and localization (l10n) features.

Updated documentation will be provided on Angular's new website, which will be launched on a new domain when AngularJS 2.0 launches. The website is already up, if you want to check it out for yourself.