AngularDart 3.0: Easy upgrade, better performance

AngularDart 3.0 is now available. It brings better performance and smaller generated code, while also making you more productive.

Version 3.0 is an evolution: although it has some breaking changes (detailed below), it is a smooth upgrade due to minimal public API adjustments. Most of the progress is under the hood—in code quality, stability, generated code size, performance, and developer experience.

Code quality:

• 2731 instances of making the framework code more type safe (using sound Dart).
• The AngularDart framework code size is down by 12%.
• Many additional style updates to the codebase:
• Changed to use idiomatic <T> for generic methods.
• Removed NgZoneImpl, all the code exists in NgZone now.

Stability:

• Many CSS encapsulation fixes due to update with csslib package.
• Fixed bugs with IE11.

Performance:

• For the Mail sample app, we see 30% faster time-to-interactive (currently 3812 ms on a simulated 3G connection, measured via Lighthouse).
• Our large app benchmark shows 2x faster render times of very deep view hierarchies (65ms versus 128ms in October).
• For AngularDart Components, we see major improvements in performance. For example, the <material-button> component gets initialized 1.5x faster (0.5ms versus 0.7ms in October).

Generated code size:

• For a small app (GWT Mail sample app), we see
• 3% reduction since October (2.0)
• 24% reduction since August (when AngularDart went all Dart)

• For large apps, we see
• 13% reduction since October
• 29% reduction since August

Developer experience:

• Simplified API
• Simpler onPush change detection using ComponentState and setState.
• Only one load method (instead of loadAsRoot, loadAsRootIntoNode).
• Got rid of TitleService, use idomatic document.title instead.
• Removed viewBindings (use viewProviders).
• ngSwitchCase replaces the soft deprecated ngSwitchWhen.
• XHR is deprecated.
• EventEmitter is deprecated: use the idiomatic Stream and StreamController instead.
• Removed IterableDifferFactory.
• A name parameter is now required for all @Pipe(...) definitions: @Pipe(name: 'uppercase') is replaced by @Pipe('uppercase').
• null is no longer propagated as an initial change value. Fields must start with a non-null value.
• Removed NgPlural; use the much more dart-y package:intl instead.

• Catching bugs earlier
• selector is now a @required property.
• ngIf throws if the bound value changes during change detection.
• In generated .template.dart change detected primitives are typed.

• Testing
• package:angular_test with improved NgTestBed.

• Dev mode tweaks
• New isDebugMode function.
• Warning when Dartium is run without checked mode.
• By default, the ExceptionHandler is a BrowserExceptionHandler which prints to console. You can override it if you don't want this behavior (for example, when releasing to production).

You can find more information in the changelog.

AngularDart 3.0 is production ready, and already used at Google by very large apps like AdWords and AdSense. Upgrade today to make your apps smaller, faster, and more reliable!