Announcements from ng-conf

We're astounded by the work the ng-conf organizers did this year in creating an amazing experience for all attendees.  Thanks for joining us!  We all had a wonderful time with you, hearing about your experiences on Angular and getting your input on the future.

In addition to the folks who came in person, more than 8000 people watched from ng-conf extended parties from 150 sites in 29 countries.  Thanks for tuning in!

If you haven’t had the time to watch through all of the videos from ng-conf last week, here’s a summary of what we announced.

In Brief

Angular 2: It is screaming fast, simpler to learn, and you can mix and match it with your existing Angular 1 applications.

Angular 1: Version 1.4 will be out with a release candidate in a week or so with many exciting new features.  The theme of 1.5 will be supporting integration with Angular 2.

AtScript is TypeScript: We’ve been collaborating with the TypeScript team on our proposed productivity extensions to JavaScript and have converged development efforts.  Details from the TypeScript team are on their blog.  Many thanks to the TypeScript team!

Details

All videos from the talk are available on the ng-conf 2015 playlist on YouTube.  Closed captions are in the works and will be added soon.

In the Day 1 Keynote, we announced the following:

• We’re nearly done with Angular 1.4 which will include better change detection performance, improvements to many APIs, support for the new router, and new i18n.
• Angular Material is nearing 1.0, contains 31 of the most useful material design UI elements with only a few to go.
• We’ll continue building releases in the Angular 1 branch until the vast majority of folks have moved to Angular 2.  We want the burden to be on the Angular team to make Angular 2 simple to learn, attractive in its features, and an easy target to migrate to from Angular 1.
• The Angular 1.5 release will start planning immediately after Angular 1.4 ships.  We’ll take community pull requests, issues, and comments to form its direction.  A primary theme will be support to make for easy migration to Angular 2.
• We’ve had a great partnership with the TypeScript team to date.  They’ve implemented the features we care most about from AtScript.  Based on this convergence, we’ve decided to retire the AtScript name and call it all TypeScript.
• We’ll work with them and many other partners to drive these features into standards via the TC39 process.
• We officially support Angular 2 development in today’s JavaScript (ECMAScript 5), ES6, TypeScript, and Dart.  Angular 2, like Angular 1, will additionally work with other compile-to-JavaScript languages like CoffeeScript and ClojureScript.
• Angular 2 is now in alpha release and you can see a preview of its new website at angular.io with its features, quickstart tutorial, and links to resources.
• Angular 2 dramatically simplifies the great developer productivity story we have in Angular 1. 
• By improving templating idioms, we’ve generalized for 35 directives, now part of Angular 1, into a single concept in Angular 2.  
• We’ve eliminated many surprises and corner cases like having to call $apply when using external libraries.
• Angular 2 builds on new web standards like ES6 and Web Components. This means that Angular 2 works seamlessly with the libraries also built on these standards, including Polymer, X-Tag, and others.  
• We’ve dramatically improved performance in Angular 2.  Change detection is up to 10x faster.  We cache view rendering making overall performance in virtual scrolling and re-visiting views incredibly fast.
• Angular 2 is similarly better in terms of memory efficiency -- critical for mobile devices.
• Performance gets even better for developers who use immutable data structures or observable objects.

For details on how this all works, please also check out the Day 2 Keynote by Misko and Rado, the Components talk by Kara and Rachael from OpenTable, and Change Detection Reinvented from Victor.

We're looking forward to your input on all of this through GitHub, Twitter, and G+.  On to the rest of 2015!