The Angular documentary by Honeypod explores its four key phases—from AngularJS to the Ivy rewrite and today’s Signals & Wiz era—highlighting its evolution, major rewrites, and Google’s deeper integration.
Angular Documentary
The Angular documentary made by Honeypod is available on YouTube. It covers the history of Angular, especially its early years. Summarized, there are four main phases or generations of the Angular framework.
It is highly recommended to watch the accompanying video (including highlights) or the full documentary, as it provides better context and captures the nuances of the original tone.
Phase 1: AngularJS
The first was AngularJS, or Angular version 1. Written in JavaScript, it quickly gained a huge fanbase and was the first of the big three (React, Vue, and Angular) we have today.
Phase 2: Serious Business
The second phase was Angular v2, which meant a rewrite of the whole framework. Why did that happen? The Google Ads department wanted to replace GWT with Angular. Their only requirement was to use a static-typed language, which eventually became TypeScript.
The great and essential thing was that Angular got way more resources and saved the project's survival.
On the other hand, the rewrite did not maintain backward compatibility with the public API, requiring developers to rewrite any AngularJS application. This had a significant impact on Angular’s reputation, which still lingers today.
Phase 3: Ivy
Surprisingly, right after the rewrite, the internal perception of Angular’s code quality was already not particularly high.
Due to time constraints, the team had to ship what they had—something that often happens under pressure. However, they knew things needed to change.
This led to another rewrite, but this time, with full backward compatibility in mind.
As a result, most developers didn’t realize that with the switch to the new Ivy renderer in Angular 9, we had actually transitioned to a new framework.
This third phase also marked a shift within the core team. Igor Minar, Mishko Hevery, and Brad Green stepped away, while Alex Rickabaugh, Jeremy Elbourn, and Minko Gechev emerged as the central public figures
Phase 4: Signals & Wiz
The fourth phase is where we are today. While standalone components in v14 were still closely tied to Ivy (Phase 3), the real turning point came with the introduction of Signals in version 16.
Two key developments stand out. First, Signals replacing RxJS for Angular’s internal reactivity system—the mechanism that tells Angular when to update the DOM.
There were several reasons why the Angular team chose Signals over the well-established RxJS, but the most significant was simplicity. Signals offer a more intuitive approach compared to RxJS.
Second, a completely new dimension of Google’s commitment to Angular emerged with the integration of Wiz—Google’s internal framework that powers critical services, including Google Search.
The long-term plan is to gradually open-source features of Wiz into Angular, bringing deeper integration and new capabilities to the framework.
resource in Angular 19.2
In other news, Angular 19.2 is shaping up to be quite exciting. New features for the resource function have already been merged, and httpResource—the alternative to HttpClient for data fetching—has landed in a PR.
Would be great to see that one merged in time for 19.2 as well!
"No-Build Workflow"
Edouard Bozon is doing some research on a no-build workflow. He makes use of the possibility to ship TypeScript directly into the browser, thereby avoiding a build step. For dependencies and the actual framework, he loads the compiled files from CDNs via import maps.
What’s the benefit? The build process is as fast as it can get - because there is no build. Type checking, which is usually handled by the TypeScript compiler, needs to be explicitly run, for example, via CI.
Running Angular without build tools, Node.js or npm · edbzn.dev
Learn how to run Angular applications without a build step using ES modules and TypeScript in the browser.
edbzn.dev
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