AngularJS 1.4 is built for speed, animations

Version 1.4 of the AngularJS JavaScript framework, focusing on enhancements for animation and performance, is now available.

The release, noted in an AngularJS announcements blog on Wednesday, has been in development since November. “This release brings many feature enhancements and performance improvements, while at the same time introducing as few breaking changes as possible. For apps following best practices, we expect the migration from Angular 1.3 to 1.4 to be smooth and the list of breaking changes is documented in the migration doc,” says the blog, posted by Peter Bacon Darwin. A Google project, AngularJS has been positioned as a JavaScript UI framework featuring dependency injection and a focus on HTML.

AngularJS 1.4 offers refactored animation, which makes it possible to imperatively control CSS-based transitions/keyrames via a service called $animateCss. “We can now also animate elements across pages via animation anchoring,” the blog states.

JavaScript animation also is a focus. “AngularJS 1.4 and higher has taken steps to make the amalgamation of CSS and JS animations more flexible,” AngularJS documentation states. “However, unlike earlier versions of Angular, defining CSS and JS animations to work off of the same CSS class will not work anymore.”

To improve performance, version 1.4 implements a rewrite of the Angular expression parser and improvements to scope watching, the compiler, and the ngOptions attribute. For internationalization, version 1.4 improves i18n support for Angular apps. The first piece of this work features an ngMessageFormat module supporting the ICU MessageFormat interpolation syntax.

The $http service in AngularJS, for communication with remote HTTP servers, now implements a mechanism for providing custom URL parameter serialization, to make it easy to connect end points that expect parameters to follow JQuery-style parameter serialization. Users also will be able to specify which version of JQuery, if any, they want to use. “This option also allows developers to instruct Angular to always use jqLite even if jQuery is present on the page, which can significantly improve performance for applications that are doing a lot of DOM manipulation via Angular’s templating engine,” says the documentation.

More than 100 bugs have been fixed in version 1.4, and two features — the component helper and the component-oriented hierarchical router — have been pulled. “The main reason for this decision,” according to Angular, “was that both of these deliverables were not ready for the important task of simplifying the migration path from Angular 1 to Angular 2. Rather than delay the 1.4 release further, we decided to move these two deliverables into the 1.5 release.”