This article will help you to choose between AngularJs (1.x version) or Angular (2+ version).
If you have developed single page applications before, you must had situations where you had to choose between AngularJs and Angular . You must have googled to find the solution , or performed a search in Stack-overflow.
Yes this is 2018 you may find it difficult to choose between the two.
I have been a AngularJs developer since 2014 and later upgraded to Angular (2+) and is currently working on Angular version 6 projects. I can give you few points regarding the same.
My Answer
It depends on the type of project and time frame and the availability of resources you have.
Let's talk
The complete explanation including the technical aspects is out of scope of this article , but i can give you few basic points.
Why and when should you consider using AngularJs ?
If you already have AngularJs Development Team at hand
If the project is a short term project and requires fast development process no time to invest on new resources
If your development team is small and you need to use existing javascript team for the project
Angular 2+ is some what diffrent framework and will require time for upgrading existing AngularJS developers to the same.
Angular (currently version 6, version seven coming next month ) updates every 6 months. Some developers find it painful to update the version of the app every 6 months if you are working on a project with huge development timeframe [ I disagree with this point though ]
AngularJs has huge Community Support .It opens a large scale of options both to developers and clients. Developers may easily find various info and solutions
Why AngularJs (1.x) still exist ?
This is 2018 and even after the release of Angular 6 the AngularJs currently at version 1.7 is still live and kicking. Looking into the details we could see the reason behind the same as following.
AngularJs was a widely used frontend framework to make Single Page applications and many of the big and small projects rely on this framework. Even if Google were to stop their support, somebody would fork Angular 1 and continue to maintain it as an independent framework
AngularJS developers will be more widely available than those who updated to the latest version of Angular
Cost of the resources is another factor as companies can still rely on resources who work in older framework
AngularJs is a stable frontend framework and and has huge plugins base and other support packages
From July 1st 2018, AngularJs has entered into Long Term Support period
The web's scaffolding tool like Yeoman provide generators for scaffolding AngularJs projects , giving it developer tools support similar to Angular cli
In the case of performance AngularJs lags behind the latest version of Angular ( version 6 ) but still it gives a decent performance
Finally the last reason, even though upgrading your existing project from AngularJs to Angular is possible it takes lot of work. it will have to undergo many changes and is not worth the time , money, effort and number of resources spend on the same
When Should you consider using Angular(2+) ?
using the latest development stack is one of the greatest advantage over the competion
If you are working on longterm project with a huge team of developers
If the project is huge and consist of different modules and need continuous support
Angular has great list of development toolset to make the development much more easy
Performance wise Angular outruns AngularJs
If you are in process of developing your on Angular Team
Angular is being improved and may get much better in the future updates in all aspects
Software Industry is currently moving to Angular 2+ and in the future google may stop support for the AngularJS
There are many more reasons including technical aspects, tools, performance and SEO but i would like to keep this article to be minimal.