Angular 19.1 is out, bringing template HMR and a schematic to clean up unused imports. This month’s Q&A touched on the new resource function and what’s ahead in 2025. The session also explored inject and dug into the potential of Rspack, a fresh bundler worth keeping an eye on.
Angular 19.1
Angular 19.1 is now available, and it introduces at least three notable capabilities.
Template HMR is the first of these. During development or serve mode, modifying a template previously triggered a full reload, forcing the application state to be reset. With 19.1, however, only the template refreshes. This behavior extends to single-file components (SFC) as well.
Angular 19.0 initiated warnings for unused component imports. Now, 19.1 offers a schematic to eliminate them. Unfortunately, this is still not packaged as an ESLint rule — hopefully, that will change soon. In the interim, you can execute the schematic from a Git Hook.
If the ngTemplateOutlet directive is in your toolkit, note a new enhancement: when it references a component, the component's instance is now directly accessible.
https://angular.love/angular-19-1
blog.ninja-squad.com
Monthly Q&A Session
During the monthly Q&A, Jeremy introduced the new resource function. He pointed out that it serves as a generic utility for handling asynchronous operations, rather than a direct substitute for HttpClient. For instance, it could be used with IndexedDB or tRPC instead of HTTP.
Additionally, he confirmed the roadmap for making RxJS optional and provided more details about its role going forward. New Angular applications will no longer require RxJS, but when it is used, it will receive top-tier support.
Moreover, he verified that both Signal Forms and httpResource are currently being planned.
Angular Strategy for 2025
The 2025 roadmap, as outlined by Angular product lead Minko Gechev, focuses on pushing zoneless from its experimental stage straight into developer preview, rolling out SignalForms as the natural evolution of template-driven and ReactiveForms (with backwards compatibility for the existing versions via Signals), and swapping out Karma for the Modern WebTest Runner. There's also an RFC in the works for selectorless, which would cut the import count for components, pipes, and directives from two down to one. All of this planning is rooted in the Developer Survey, which gathered input from 10,000 respondents. The findings threw up a surprise: RxJS was the feature people were most unhappy about, while Signals drew the most praise.
inject() as ServiceLocator?
Tech circles often get tangled up in debates about the correct terminology for a concept. In Angular, a recurring topic is whether the inject function qualifies as a ServiceLocator, and if it does, whether developers should steer clear of it. But the real issue that tends to fall by the wayside is the inherent flaw in the ServiceLocator pattern.
Matthieu Riegler dives into this in a recent write-up. His take is that inject fits more naturally with DI because the dependencies get resolved at construction time, not scattered throughout; it plays nicely with Angular's DI mechanism; and it lets you keep the implementation separate from what the consumer actually needs. But he also points out that inject can be misused — reaching for runInInjectionContext lets you call it from anywhere, which kills the declarative intent it was designed for.
Mattieu has also shared a decision chart that points you to the correct Signal-based type or function depending on the scenario you're facing.
Rspack
Expect to hear the name Rspack a lot over the next twelve months. It's a bundler, sitting in the same category as webpack or esbuild, but with a promise of significantly quicker builds. It was built by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, to address their own internal challenges — mainly managing massive codebases and monorepos. Rspack is written in Rust and designed to slot right into webpack's ecosystem.
Angular has no official backing for this, yet Colum Ferry at Nx is investigating and developing an Angular integration. Several early releases already look very encouraging.
For deeper details, check out the ng-rspack-build repository on GitHub, keep an eye on Colum Ferry's updates, or explore a write-up from Manfred Steyer.
Coly010
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ng-rspack-build
Rspack plugin and loaders to build Angular applications
THIS REPOSITORY HAS BEEN MOVED TO NRWL/ANGULAR-RSPACK. PLEASE USE THAT REPO FOR FURTHER UPDATES.
Angular Rspack and Rsbuild Tools
Build Angular with Rspack and Rsbuild
The goal of @ng-rsbuild/plugin-angular and @ng-rspack/build is to make it easy and straightforward to build Angular applications with Rspack and Rsbuild.
Feature Parity
The following aims to compare features of Rspack and Rsbuild, and it's Angular wrapper with Angular's standards (Angular CLI and Webpack/esbuild).
Rspack and Rsbuild are modern, high-performance JavaScript build tools designed as alternatives to Webpack and other traditional bundlers.
📌 Mapping ng-rspack & ng-rsbuild Packages to Angular CLI Components
This table maps the key ng-rspack and ng-rsbuild packages to their equivalent Angular CLI components to show how Rspack and Rsbuild replace or mirror Angular CLI's system.
Package Comparison
| ng-rspack / ng-rsbuild Package | New Equivalent in Angular CLI / DevKit | Old Equivalent in Angular CLI / |
|---|
Nx and Angular with Rspack and Module Federation - ANGULARarchitects
angulararchitects.io
rspack.rs