Hello, coders. While you are still using AngularJS, someone has already moved further and began to use new versions of Angular. Let’s figure out what the difference between them and what tools you need for AngularJS to Angular migration.
What’s The Difference Between Angularjs And Angular?
In fact, a lot has changed since new versions of Angular were released. File structure, moving from controllers to components, different methods of handling dependency injection, switching to Typescript, different routing system and angular cli are just a few details among the whole system of migrating from AngularJS to Angular 2.
To be brief, the only real benefit of going from ng1 to ng2 is knowing the client-side MVC principle and most of the terminology.
Basically, they are two different and different structures, so you will have to learn Angular 2+ from scratch.
Migrating an AngularJS app to Angular is essentially a whole rewrite of the app, so your knowledge of AngularJS probably won’t be that helpful to you.
You will need a good resource like ng-book 2 if you need to get acquainted with Angular 2. You will also need Typescript knowledge to use Angular 2 with its maximum opportunities.
Why Do You Need Migration?
Migration, in this context, is changing the structure of a database from one version to another.
Therefore, I suggest that in cases where the context is not obvious, we can use a more accurate term: versioned database migration.
The database version must match the application version. These are inseparable parts of one whole. This means that when a new version of the application is delivered to production, it is necessary to update the version of the database, otherwise the application will simply not be able to work correctly.
Why Is This Needed?
Well, for example, it is needed so that the new code does not try to work with the old version of the data (spoiling it or simply giving an incorrect result), so that the old code does not do the same with the new version. In order to, in principle, understand what version of the data is here and whether it needs to be updated or is it already updated. Imagine that there is more than one instance of the code and the database and it takes a long time to update them all at once. Not always there are such cases when you can stop the program, update the code, update the database structure, check that everything matches and run it neatly.
Most often, migration is used to move a base to a new structure correctly. In projects it often happens that before everything went according to the same structure, and then the existing base needs to be redone, but the data cannot be lost in any way.
What Tools Do You Need To Migrate From Angularjs To Angular?
The Angular team has released several tools to make it easier to migrate from AngularJS to Angular.
Actually, the AngularJS framework team has released two custom “helpers” – ngMigration Assistant and Forum. The tools let you know which is the right way of transition from AngularJS to Angular, how to simplify the process as much as possible and avoid mistakes.
-
ngMigration Assistant
ngMigration Assistant is a command line tool that analyzes any AngularJS application, regardless of size, and recommends the best migration path. To help the user, statistics are offered that tell about the complexity, size, content and template of the application. Based on this data, the program provides a list of clear guidelines to simplify the transition from AngularJS to Angular, given the size and complexity of the code.
First, the tool shows the statistics of the available data, and then – the stages of preparation for migration to Angular.
-
ngMigration Forum
The new ngMigration Forum community provides up-to-date information on migration paths and tools for migrating from AngularJS to Angular.
ngMigration Forum is a place for exchanging experience, solving problems and questions for framework experts.
How To Migrate From Angularjs To Angular?
In case if you want to migrate your app I would recommend writing the code from scratch in a step-by-step approach. Start by making sure your AngularJS code is written in a way that is easy to use in your Angular 2+ project:
- Make sure that each component contains all of its markup and style and is written at least in the “class like” template (if you are using ES5), so it will be easy to switch to Typescript.
- The structure of your application shares feature modules such as Angular suggest.
- Third party libraries – make sure they all have stable support for angular 5. For example, when I migrated one of my projects to angular 5, I found that the old material component was not stable for Angular 2+ yet and it took a while to get it tuned.
Conclusion
I hope that this article was a helpful guide for you to get to know what tools you need for AngularJs to Angular migration. Thank you for showing your interest and good luck in coding!