BANGALORE, INDIA: Building web-apps is not that easy, even for building a Hello World application you need to know a whole lot of different pieces of technologies to make that work. While HTML and JavaScript are used everywhere, and can be used as a strong framework for building the newer web applications. That's is what Angular is all about.

Angular is not a generic system, something like jQuery with which you can build anything you want which is feasible inside a browser. In Angular, the kind of applications that can be build are the CRUD applications (Create, Read, Update and Delete applications).

Most of the web falls under this category, i.e. you talk to the server, you fetch some data, display the data to user, the user may change the data and save back the data onto the server; which is the complete CRUD lifecycle. So apps like flight ticketing system, data entry or even Gmail could be good candidates for Angular based development.

The real wow factor for Angular is the bi-directional data-binding or the fact that they don't have to manipulate the DOM. The reason why it is important is because you can now clearly separate the behavior and model of the application from the rendering part. The rendering part just becomes pure HTML while having some extra tags, and once the HTML is complied into the view, this view becomes the projection of the model. And as you modify the model, the view also changes.

Testing on Angular

Web is a completely different story, because in web you can release your product versions all the time. Therefore most organizations schedule their release cycle very frequently, once a month or even once a week for their web applications. So, when you have a schedule cycle that is having so fast turnaround, then you face the problem of not being able to do full manual end-to-end tests.

That is where you have to deploy automated testing. The trouble with automated testing is that its hard to do, more specifically, if you want to write your code in the way that's its amiable to testing then you have to follow strict practices.

Where Angular helps you is that it manages all this for you, but it also comes with a story on how you have to test and what you have to test, so it helps you out of the box in creating the testing story. Something which other framework have nothing to say about testing story and you are responsible for figuring that out yourself. With Angular, you can get all these pieces of puzzle sorted and have a quick turnaround time for your web application.

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