Angular 1.5.0 - ennoblement-facilitation has been released!

We have just released the next major version of Angular 1, which has been in development since May last year.
The primary theme for this release was to improve the upgrade path to Angular 2.
In this release we have added features that will enable developers to write Angular 1 applications that are closer to the way that applications are structured in Angular 2.

New Features

The big feature changes to Angular 1 in this release are mostly focused around supporting Angular applications that are built from Components. But there are a number of other features that will improve your development experience.

Component-based applications

Defining component directives

While creating components in Angular has been the primary way of structuring applications for a long time, we now made it possible for you to easily define a component directive with the module.component() helper method. For example a simple component only needs to provide a template, some bindings and a controller. For the remaining directive options we set sensible defaults.

myModule.component('myComponent', {
  template: '<h1>Hello {{ $ctrl.getFullName() }}</h1>',
  bindings: { firstName: '<', lastName: '<' },
  controller: function() {
    this.getFullName = function() {
      return this.firstName + ' ' + this.lastName;
    };
  }
});

<my-component first-name="'Alan'" last-name="'Rickman'"></my-component>
Read the new component guide to find out more about this.

Lifecycle hooks

If your directive/component controller has a method called $onInit() the compiler will now call it after the component has been initialized and all its bindings have been set up. This provides a clear place to put the initialization code for your components and is similar to the ngOnInit() lifecycle hook of Angular 2.

Binding to required directives

As well as the string and array forms, you can now specify an object for the require property of directives and components. If used with bindToController, the compiler will also automatically bind these required directive controllers to your controller.
These bindings (including those of sibling directives) are guaranteed to be in place by the time the $onInit() hook is called.

Multi-slot transclusion

You can now specify that different parts of the transcluded content is rendered at different slots in the template. See the 1.5.0-beta.2 release announcement for a detailed explanation of this feature.

Default transclusion content

ngTransclude no longer overwrites its contents if there is no content to fill it. This means that you can provide default content to be shown if the user of your directive has not provided any content to be transcluded.

One-way bindings

You can now define a directive/component binding using the '<' character to indicate that the binding is one-way. In this case the compiler will only set up a watch on the outer expression and not on the internal property. This means that changes to the value of a binding inside the component will not be propagated to the outside. See the $compile API docs for more information.

Improved support for ES6 classes

We now support instantiation of native ES6 classes in the $injector and as a controller. Due to variable browser support this is a volatile feature, so be careful to test on your target browsers before going to production.

ngAnimateSwap Directive

We have introduced the new ngAnimateSwap directive, which allows you to animate a collection of DOM changes together as a single container swap. See the 1.5.0-beta.2 release announcement for a detailed explanation of this feature.

ngResource

We now have proper support for cancellable actions on resources, which means a $cancelRequest() method will be available on the return value of the request method.

ngRoute

Any promises resolved as part of a route's resolve property are now added to the scope as a $resolve property, which saves you having to inject them into the route controller.

Other Improvements

There are loads of other improvements, which you can find in the Angular changelog. Here are a few highlights:

• You can now access the locals object that was passed to a call to $parse from inside the parsed expression, via a $locals variable.
• You can provide $http configuration options of the $templateRequest service.
• You can create your own custom XHR objects for the $http via the $xhrFactory service.
• ngModel now provides ng-empty and ng-not-empty CSS classes.
• The ngAria module is now more precise with handling of ARIA attributes and tabindex for custom controls.
• Some new helpers are available on ngMock to ease testing:
• $componentController,
• $httpBackend.expectRoute()/whenRoute(),
• $animate.closeAndFlush().

Security Improvements

There have been a number of people who have contributed to the project over the last few releases by analyzing and identifying security issues in the Angular code base, which we have then fixed. We really appreciate the work that these people do. In particular we would like to thank Mario Heiderich, Gareth Heyes and Jann Horn and the security team at Google.

Migrating from 1.4 to 1.5

Angular 1.5 is the fastest, most feature complete and reliable version of Angular to date. We highly recommend upgrading your applications to use it.
While we tried to keep the number of breaking changes in the core to a minimum a few were unavoidable and will generally only affect very rare corner cases.
You can read about how to migrate and what breaking changes might affect your application in the migration guide.
If you find any issues with Angular while you are migrating, please report them at Github.

Thanks

Once again, Angular could not be what it is without the constant support of the literally millions of developers across the world who are using and contributing to the project, either through submitting issues and pull requests, running conferences and workshops, writing tutorials and sharing their real world experiences.

From everyone at the Angular team, we hope you enjoy developing with this latest version as much as we have enjoyed building it.