The Enterprise in 2018: Putting Angular and Progressive Web Apps to Work

In the past year, Angular has seen tremendous growth in the web developer community. The framework is emerging as the most popular platform for public-facing websites from Microsoft to Capital One, and leading global companies are bringing Angular behind their corporate firewalls.

Enterprise web development teams continue to be expected to do more and more with less. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are an attractive a path to achieve that goal. As Angular matures and a development tools ecosystem grows around it, established ISVs like Infragistics are assisting enterprise adoption.

Infragistics was around for the birth of .NET and we became the most dominant vendor in the world of enterprise desktop applications by helping business developers code high-performing, easy-to-use applications with a familiar look and feel. 

Today, Infragistics is proud to announce the release of Ignite UI for Angular. 

Why is Angular gaining momentum?

To understand where the framework is going, let’s briefly look back at where it has been.

In 2009, Miško Hevery developed AngularJS with a friend to “see if we could make it easier for Web designers, not necessarily Web developers, but Web designers, to sprinkle a little bit of extra HTML into their code so that they could turn a static form to something they could actually send in an email.”

Hevery brought his side project to his employers at Google, who eventually brought the framework into their fold. Angular became his full-time job, while keeping strong community-based roots.

Version 1.0 of AngularJS debuted in June of 2012, and quickly became popular for its robust application infrastructure, ability to reduce boilerplate, and improved code testability.

Fast-forward to September 2014, when the Angular team announced a ground-up rewrite of AngularJS, first known as Angular 2. The new version was rewritten with Microsoft's superset of JavaScript, TypeScript, and was focused on being smaller, faster, and easier to understand.

Since its release last September, the framework has picked up considerable steam, not just because it delivers on promised performance and scalability enhancements, but because of how easily it enables PWAs.

P-W-What?

Any developer publication you read lately seems to be buzzing with the Google-coined term: Progressive Web Apps.

Smashing Magazine describes a PWA as a combination of the best of web and mobile apps, taking advantage of the latest technology. “Think of it as a website built using web technologies but that acts and feels like an app.”

Gartner’s Jason Wong advises in his March 2017 report, Progressive Web Apps Will Impact Your Mobile App Strategy: “Application leaders responsible for mobile app strategies must determine when — not if — they need to factor in PWAs as part of their overall mobile development strategy.”

Browser-based apps are popular because they are low-friction and high-performance, and are deployed across multiple devices with just one build. However, they lack the UX and stickiness of native mobile apps. Progressive Web Apps aim to be the best of both worlds, and InfoWorld reports that the next releases of Angular aim to make PWAs even easier to build and deploy.

This allows developers to be more efficient, building scalable, user-friendly apps for mobile and desktop at the same time, while leveraging the skills they already have.

“We're seeing huge growth, with tons of production applications that launch every day using Angular,” said Stephen Fluin, Developer Advocate for Angular, Google. “We’re providing the stability that is key for developers, but at the same time we balance that with innovation. We keep you developing applications the way you learn. You learn Angular and write applications, then we can automatically take advantage of the web for you as it continues to progress and evolve.”

A better UI for a better UX

Infragistics has long aimed to stay at the forefront of creating tools to provide the community with the latest technologies and best experiences as they relate to the modern web. That’s why last month our CEO, Dean Guida, reiterated our commitment to deliver best-in-class UI components for developers coding on the Angular framework.

“We are proud of our rich history in providing the first UI Controls for .NET and for desktop apps in the enterprise,” said Jason Beres, senior vice president of Developer Tools, Infragistics. “The convergence of web framework maturity and development team needs today feels very similar to when Windows Forms started to dominate new projects in the enterprise. We are committing to Angular in the spirit of Misko Hevery, with the goal of bringing design and development together to achieve rapid Web app development through WYSIWYG web app building, WYSIWYG UI Design Kits, CLI for modern frameworks, and integration with today’s most popular IDEs.”

Infragistics’ newest member of the Ignite UI family features incredible UI components for PWAs with:

• More than 30 true Angular components, including Infragistics’ popular Data Grid
• The ability to build and deploy fast though GitHub and NPM
• A Sketch UI library
• An API designed to support Angular component conventions
• The enterprise-ready support and training that Infragistics is known for

What’s Ahead in Ignite UI for Angular

Through continuous delivery in 2018, we will focus on delivering new features and capabilities to our Angular data grids and Angular charts.   In the grid, we will be delivering row and column virtualization, master-detail views, inline editing, Microsoft Excel-style filtering, row and column pinning, full column management like grouping, pinning, and multi-column headers plus export to Microsoft Excel. 

Charting will include the same real-time, high-volume date support for all of the common business charts that we currently ship in our Ignite UI for JavaScript product.   

As we continue to focus on helping design teams and developers delivery software faster with beautiful UX, we will continue to delivery features like enhanced Ignite UI CLI features, integration with the Angular CLI, more Sketch UI kits and app templates for the designer-developer workflow, and visual configurators for charts and grids for any code editor, including Visual Studio Code.

Get Started Today

Click here for directions on how to install Ignite UI for Angular. Check out our list of the top reasons to get started with Ignite UI for Angular, and see what is new with the release. Then call one of our five worldwide offices to set up a product demo, and learn about our training and support.