Angular 15 arrives with standalone APIs

Angular 15, the latest version of the Google-developed, TypeScript-based web application framework, has just been released. The update features now-stable, “standalone” APIs that allow developers to build applications without using NgModules.

Angular 15 was officially unveiled on November 16. The standalone APIs, introduced as a developer preview in Angular 14 in June, let developers bootstrap an application using a single component. They work in HttpClient, Angular Elements, router, and elsewhere. Standalone components are intended to simplify development and serve as an alternative to NgModules, a way of managing dependencies that developers viewed as unnecessarily complex.

Also in Angular 15, a new directive composition API promises to enhance code reuse. It enables developers to enhance host elements with directives and fits Angular with a code reuse strategy. A new image directive, now stable, adds features such as automatic srcset generation, to ensure an appropriately sized image, and experimental fill mode, to cause an image to fill its parent container, removing the requirement to declare the image’s height and width. The standalone NgOptimizedImage can be used directly in a component or NgModule.

Instructions for getting started with Angular can be found on GitHub.

Angular 15 also includes the following features and enhancements:

• Improved stack traces for debugging.
• Material Design Components for Web (MDC), now stable.
• Range selection support in the slider and a density customization API for components.
• Component Dev Kit (CDK) adds a CDK listbox primitive.
• Improvements to the experimental support for the ESbuild JavaScript bundler, with experimental backing for Sass, SVG template, file replacement, and ng – watch.
• The Angular CLI lets you generate a new standalone component, via ng g component –- standalone. And the output of ng new has been simplified, removing test.ts, polyfills.ts, and environments to reduce the configuration.
• Developers can globally change the default formatting configuration for DatePipe.
• The language service now can automatically import components being used on a template but that have not been added to a standalone component or NgModule.

Future plans for Angular include improvements to the server-side rendering pipeline and reactivity along with quality-of-life improvements.