What’s New in Angular 16: Leverage the New Angular 16 Features

Angular 16 brings new features and upgrades for developers, business owners, and tech enthusiasts, elevating the development experience to new heights. This release revolutionized web application building with improved performance, stability, innovative tools, and capabilities. Angular 16 was released on 03 May 2023

Discover the world of Angular 16 new features for extraordinary web apps. Unlock new possibilities with the latest advancements and take your projects to new heights.

Understanding the Core Angular 16 Features and Updates

Angular v16 offers numerous improvements, making it more efficient for developers and tech enthusiasts. It addresses over 2500 feature requests with quality-of-life improvements. Let’s explore what’s new in Angular 16.

1. Automatic route params mapping

It is one of the best Angular 16 Features as its automatic route params mapping simplifies working with route parameters by binding them to component properties. With automatic route params mapping, developers no longer manually assign route parameters. 

Angular handles mapping for concise code and fewer errors. This upgrade boosts developer efficiency, readability, and scalability by removing redundant code for route parameter extraction and assignment. 

Developers can use automatic route params mapping in Angular 16 to build dynamic apps easily and take advantage of its enhanced capabilities. 

2. Modernised Reactivity

Angular 16 offers a new reactivity model with improved performance and developer experience. This system reduces computations, simplifies reactivity, updates components efficiently, and enhances interoperability. 

Angular 16 prioritizes reactivity, with active GitHub discussions and promising RFCs. Check out the new signals library in @angular/core and look forward to full integration in the framework soon, transforming your Angular app development. 

3. Server Side Rendering With Progressive Hydration

Angular 16 introduces “progressive hydration” for server-side rendering, improving the user experience by gradually hydrating the server-rendered DOM on the client side. No more flickering during application load! 

Add provideClientHydration() to your providers to leverage this one of the Angular 16 Features. The updated HttpClient also enables storing and reusing request results during hydration. 

Although the developer preview is promising, valid HTML maintenance, consistent DOM management, and i18n limitations must be considered. Debugging help is available during development, and Angular Universal makes experimentation simple. 

Also Read : Top Crucial 20 Angular Best Practices to Adopt in 2024

4. Angular Signals Revamped

Angular 16, the talk of the Angular community, revamps Angular Signals. Signals will transform Angular app development. Signals are added as a developer preview in this release. 

Angular bootstraps using provideZoneChangeDetection to configure ZoneJS explicitly. This allows developers to exclude ZoneJS from their Angular projects, enabling zoneless applications. As Signals evolves, Angular developers will have greater flexibility and control.

5. Esbuild Dev Server

Great news for Angular devs! Angular 16 now offers experimental support for esbuild with ng build and ng serve. It boosts startup times by at least two-fold compared to webpack. 

Use @angular-devkit/build-angular: browser-build for better performance in your angular application, but it’s still experimental, with further enhancements coming. Speed up development with Angular 16 for faster build and serve times.

6. Flexible DestroyRef Provider

DestroyRef, with its strong onDestroy method, is new in Angular v16. This new class can be inserted to register code for context deletion. OnDestroy reliably executes code during component, directive, and utility function destruction. 

DestroyRef lets you clean up, release resources, or handle special context destruction scenarios. This functionality enhances component lifecycle management and resource utilization in Angular apps. DestroyRef in Angular v16 improves application robustness and memory management throughout its lifecycle.

7. Improved tooling for standalone components, directives, and pipes

Angular 16 improves tooling for components, directives, and pipes. Create more versatile elements and easily generate standalone components for greater flexibility in usage. 

Use standalone components to create reusable UI elements and libraries across multiple projects. With improved tooling for directives and pipes in Angular 16, streamline development, improve code organization, and maximize reuse for more efficient and scalable Angular apps. Upgrade your Angular development with standalone components in Angular 16.

Some More Common Updates in Angular 16

• The esbuild-based build system in Angular 16 improves cold production builds by 72%.
• The Angular Signals package manages reactive values and their dependencies. Angular 16 offers a signal to lift with @angular/core/rxjs-interop. 
• Also, standalone schematics for new projects are now available. 
• The Jest testing framework is now supported. 
• Nonce attribute available for Angular styles to boost security. 
• Self-closing tags can close Angular component tags. 
• Route parameters can enhance input for matching components. 
• TypeScript 5.0 supports ECMAScript decorators for extending JavaScript classes.

Harikrishna Kundariya

CEO, eSparkBiz

Harikrishna Kundariya, a marketer, developer, IoT, chatbot and blockchain savvy, designer, co-founder, Director of eSparkBiz @Software Development Company where you can Hire Software Developers. His 14+ experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on Web app development.