AngularJS official Google support has ended as of January 2022
Starting on the 1st of July, 2018, AngularJS entered a three-year-long LTS (Long Term Support). During this period, very few commits were done on the project, progressively shifting the contributor’s community focus toward the new Angular, which has now reached version 14.
Why You Should Care about End of Support
Developers usually care a lot about security: “Without adequate support, software potentially becomes less safe and secure over time”. A framework not being supported means that security flaws and issues are not going to be patched anymore. With the amount of Javascript NPM libraries out there, security issues detected are increasing day after day. And having a potentially vulnerable library that is not going to be secured is a tremendously hazardous game.
Furthermore, AngularJS is a very solid library with several years of development, backed up by Google engineers and the open-source community. But it’s far from being perfect. With EOS, bugs will not be fixed anymore. If you happen to find a working malfunction in AngularJS, no one will take care of it.
In addition, developers that have to work with old and outdated library frameworks like AngularJS are usually frowned upon. Developers don’t want to work on projects and technologies that will not grant any valuable experience for their careers.
What are the Alternatives for Existing Projects?
Projects that are still running AngularJS in 2022 have some alternatives at stake.
Firstly, It’s still possible to continue working with AngularJS Support by requiring an extension of it. If the project you are considering migrating to will be discontinued in the next year, this is the best solution to avoid unnecessary and costly migration expenses.
In addition, there is the principal de-facto solution strongly recommended and extremely touted by Google: migrate all existing AngularJS applications to the new and shiny Angular. They have provided several tools and well-documented processes to ease the work.
However, even if Google presents the process to be simple and feasible, migrating an old and presumably complex application using automatic code generation tools is far from being the easy solution. Moving from Javascript to Typescript could be the first big obstacle. Besides, the third-party libraries that were working flawlessly with AngularJS might not work with Angular.
The “automatic” migration process could be so complex and convoluted that a complete rewrite of the application from scratch could cost less in terms of energy and time (which means, of course, money).
Chances are that if you liked the simplicity and ease of use of AngularJS, you will not like the abominable amount of third-party libraries required for Angular2+ to run a simple application. At this point, you might as well choose a different Javascript framework for the migration, and that is one of the awesome advantages of rewriting. You can adopt new architecture and new strategies based on the experience you have gathered during the first development of the application.
Using a “micro-frontend” approach could be another option. The product needs to be separated into different web views composed together by a framework-agnostic orchestrator. At this point, a progressive and independent process could start taking care of the migration of the application step by step. While the project will continue evolving with new features already relying on the new chosen Javascript framework, the migration will happen in parallel, reducing the technical debt in a transparent and unblocking asynchronous fashion.
Is It Still Possible to Use AngularJS for New Projects?
While it is still possible and absolutely simple to use AngularJS for new projects (as simple as including one Javascript file inside the index.html file), it is not recommended at all.
There are dozens of new Javascript frameworks that you should instead consider. Even if your team has great experience with the framework, it will never outweigh the cost of the migration that sooner or later has to happen if the project you are working on is expected to be up and running long enough.
A good choice is using AngularJS as a tool to learn web development. AngularJS was one of the best libraries of the Javascript ecosystem ever created and has been the starting point for many web developers. Many recent Javascript libraries are based on the same constructs that AngularJS first implemented. It might be instructive to work on a framework that has made web development history.
Conclusion
AngularJS was one of the best Javascript frameworks of its time. Nowadays, its light is fading and companies should consider a new approach to web development. It is still possible to postpone migration by requiring an extension of the software support, but the unavoidable end of the framework is upon us.