Developers love AngularJS. They just really really love it. Don’t believe us? Look at the GitHub activity. AngularJS probably has the highest number of contributions than any other competing JavaScript framework. Check out Google searches or even StackOverflow mentions – AngularJS is all over.

Job trends on Indeed.com, a developer jobs site, also show a strong bias towards AngularJS than any other framework.

So what are the reasons behind this popularity? Why is this the self-proclaimed “superheroic JavaScript framework” gaining so much attention and traction? Why is the popularity of AnugularJS exploding? I have also heard that hundreds of tickets for ng-conf, one of the first AngularJS conferences, were sold out in just a few minutes!

Let’s take a look at what makes AngularJS so popular –

1. The Google Power :-
The very fact that AngularJS is built and maintained by a dedicated and talented team of Google Engineers, assures that you are working with reliable and efficient code which can offer you the required scalability for your project. Along with the solid foundation, the Google team brings in the required knowledge and support. So along with the vast open community, you have the Google engineers available to answer your questions and help you use AngularJS optimally.

2. Faster Page Loading :-
AngularJS is massively popular amongst single page sites or web applications. One of the popular reasons behind this could be the faster page loading. By saving the templates (which is essentially the HTML content) in the cache, AngularJS cuts the server reload time and removes the need to hit the server each time to retrieve the template. This makes the page loading faster.

Developers can architect the front-end application in such a way that the coupling on the back-end is minimized, which further improves the page loading performance.

3. Rapid Development :-
AngularJS on front-end along with Node.js in the backend can help the developers in rapid development by automating the repetitive tasks. This frees up the developers time for the actual development and building of business logic. With the use of data binding and Dependency Injection of AngularJS, developers can eliminate much of the code that has to be written. The two-way data binding reduces the amount of code which has to be written to maintain cohesive agreement between the model and view.

Some of the tools which help in faster development are –

• ng-annotate – This helps in maintaining Angular dependency injection while minifying the JS files.
• JSLint – Helps in validating the JS Code.
• Sass/Less compiler – Helps in CSS compilation.
•  Bower – It is a very good Package Manager for AngularJS third party components (For example: Nuget and NPM, a NodeJS package manager)

4. Flexibility in Development :-
Most of the other frameworks require you to first split your app into MVC components and then bind those components using the code. This increases the amount of coding. In case of AnugularJS, all you need to do is just split your app into MVC components – the rest is taken care by AnugularJS itself. It manages the components on its own and acts as the pipeline to connect them. Since the connection is handled by AngularJS, developers cannot write incorrect code that breaks abstractions just to make the components fit easier.

5. Collaboration :-
For projects where there are multiple developers working on the project, there are often issues about managing dependencies. AngularJS makes it relatively easy to manage the dependencies. It allows you to break down various actions into their own services and sub-controllers. Developers can independently code and test without messing with each other’s code. This is a bliss in the case of larger projects. It automatically introduces a nice workflow and processes which allow frictionless collaboration.

6. Mobility:-
AngularJS is extremely useful in building hybrid mobile applications. Before AngularJS, developers needed to use JQuery mobile framework for building hybrid mobile applications. However, JQuery mobile framework makes the code complex and it is also not very efficient for multi-page applications. AngularJS makes the code less complex and helps in creating highly efficient mobile apps. Some of the advantages of using AngularJS in mobile development are –

• Reduced DOM manipulation
• In-built routes provider
• Seamless gesture handling
• In-built transition animations
• Performance improvement through the use of saving of templates in cache
• Access to local storage

7. Testability:-
AngularJS is known as unit testing ready. It has been written keeping testability in mind. AngularJS links the whole application together using Dependency Injection or DI. The DI manages the controllers and scopes of the application.

Since all the information to the controllers is passed through DI, the unit tests can be performed by injecting mock data into the controller and measuring the output and behavior.

AngularJS also offers a mock HTTP provider for injecting fake server responses into controllers for unit testing. This is anytime faster than the traditional way of web application testing where individual test pages had to be created to invoke one component and check the interactions with it.

8. Less Coding:-
AngularJS requires considerably less coding as compared to other frameworks. Because of less coding, it becomes easier for the developers to keep a systematic track of the functions.

Here are some of the cases where AngularJS requires less code –

• Views are defined using HTML to make them more concise.
• Developers do not need to write their own pipeline – it is offered readymade through Dependency Injection.
• With no need of getter/setter functions, the Data model is simple.
• Developers don’t need to provide data manually to the view – it is facilitated by the data-binding feature.
• Directives are written separately from the application code – this allows parallel development without any worries of integration issues.
• Without changing the controllers, data on the view level can be manipulated using filters.

AngularJS encourages object oriented design thinking on the client-side which makes the application more maintainable. And the icing on the cake is that one can be proficient in AnugularJS in a reasonably less time!