Angular 15, a planned upgrade to Google’s TypeScript framework for web development, will stabilize standalone component APIs, simplifying application building, and offer a new way to compose UI logic, the company announced.
Angular 15 is expected to arrive in November, said Minko Gechev, Google developer relations lead and an engineer on the Angular team. Standalone components, introduced in Angular 14 in June as a developer preview, will reduce the need for using NgModules, which configure injectors, as well as the compiler. Standalone components promise to help with organization, reduce boilerplate, and make applications easier to build. Standalone component APIs move to stable status with the new release.
Also due in Angular 15 is a directive composition API for composing UI logic. In a tweet, Gechev described the technology as providing a new way for reusing UI logic. This API is enabled by the Angular compiler, which enhances the semantics of TypeScript. Angular’s developers also hope to release MDC (Material Design Components) for the web as stable alongside the Angular 15 release.
Other capabilities planned for Angular 15 include:
- Image directives for improved web page performance, with better scores for Core Web Vitals.
- A preview of dependency injection debugging in Angular DevTools.
- Simplified Angular CLI output for
ng new, for creating a new Angular workspace. - Improved debugging in Zone.js, for async stack traces with the new async stack tagging API developed in conjunction with the Chrome DevTools team.
In other Angular news, the project’s developers have decided to deprecate the Protractor testing framework, based on community feedback. Plans were detailed in a blog post on August 10. A long-term support option will be sought for those wishing to continue using Protractor for active projects. The last version of Protractor is expected in Angular 16, due in the summer of 2023. Angular 12 previously added support for testing frameworks including Cypress, Nightwatch, and WebdriverIO.