Angular 17 is drawing closer. The first release candidate landed last week.
Mark Thompson & Alex Rickabaugh on New Template Syntax and @defer
Two members of the Angular core team, Mark Thompson and Alex Rickabaugh, sat down at Angular Nation to walk through what's coming for templates.
Mark pointed out that the new template syntax does not break existing applications. Although version 17 might ship with an automatic migration, developers can keep using structural directives if they prefer the older approach.
Mark also mentioned that Angular is once again leading the pack and predicted that other frameworks will adopt similar patterns before long.
Whether the new template syntax arrives as a developer preview or stable is still up in the air. The team might opt for developer preview because some of the algorithms behind list rendering are not yet final.
Alex stressed that this should not be a reason to avoid migrating from structural directives.
A benchmark run against the alpha build shows a measurable improvement when list rows are reordered — exactly the scenario Alex mentioned.
Template-Driven Forms and Signals
Hooking up Signals with Template-Driven Forms can get verbose. Two-way binding is not an option there, so you are left writing an explicit event listener.
Brecht Billiet from SimplifiedCourses put together a video showing a two-line directive that keeps Signals in sync via valueChanges, cutting down the usual boilerplate significantly.
State Adapt 2
NgRx remains the go-to state management library in Angular, but there are other contenders. A relative newcomer, State Adapt, recently shipped version 2.
Its selling point is a declarative API. State Adapt can sit on top of NgRx or work without it, and it comes with support for the Redux DevTools. The library is maintained by @mfp22, who regularly writes on dev.to about state management and other Angular-related topics.
RxAngular
RxAngular, another state management option, moved up to a minor release with version 16.1.
The project is actually a collection of tools: one part focuses on state management, while the other provides directives aimed at high-performance Angular applications.
rx-angular.io