Google's product for Web applications: Angular

BANGALORE, INDIA: Another round of Java track at Spark IT 2011 was on Google’s Angular by Misko Hevery, Agile Coach at Google, who talked about his project at Google regarding Angular.

Starting his session, Misko resonated words from his blog, “building web-applications is hard! Even the simplest hello world application will take you hours to set up and you have to know a lot about how many different pieces of technologies work together.”

He pointed out that HTML/Javascript would be around for a few years, but HTML 5 and ESS+ address low level issues and RFEs. Nobody is issuing higher level issues related to web-development.

He explained that existing products in the market like Jquery is good for DOM manipulation, but in case of web app, that would be the 20 per cent of the task.

Hevery said, “At Google, we are increasing abstraction on HTML/Javascript. What HTML becomes is a projection of data.”

With Angular code there comes a host of features like controller, $*hr and dependency injection, data-binding and templating. He added, documents like blogs do not need to be tested but web application asks for a huge amount of tests. Here Angular tests take care of most of the DOM manipulation.

It is a pure Java Script, a pure client-side, with two components namely HTML compiler and Javascript framework.

He concluded that while they are yet to reach to the version 1.0, many apps are subject to change and documentation is increasing fast.