Minko Gechev is a brave man. The product and developer relations lead for Angular at Google asked on LinkedIn if developers could change one thing in Angular, what would that be? Granted, that’s not quite as brave as asking for public feedback on the platform previously known as Twitter, but still — it’s gutsy.
He garnered 181 comments, and it looks like, at some point, he stopped responding.
The most frequent request seemed to be eliminating Reactive Extensions for JavaScript (RxJS). It’s a JavaScript library that uses Observables to make it easier to write asynchronous or callback-based code. Observables represent a sequence of values emitted over time, allowing the developer to work with data that arrives piece by piece.
Gechev had good news for those folks. For example, consider his response to principal software engineer Piotr Stępniewski, who suggested that reactive and template-driven forms should be unified and not based on RxJS at all.
“I would like to see something like Formik in React ecosystem,” Stepniewski wrote. Formik is a popular open source library that simplifies building and handling forms in React applications.
“Since that’s the characteristic of Angular you appreciate the most, make sure you stick with @angular/forms for the next couple of years and we’ll gradually make them free from RxJS :) ,” Gechev responded.
A bit down the thread, Gechev elaborated to another poster.
“We’re working towards making RxJS optional while also providing hooks for people who want to use it,” Gechev said. “Angular itself will not use RxJS in very near future. Making it optional from forms and router is also coming in the next years.”
On a related note, Will Le Mière would like the Angular team to just support its own state management system. That ties back to the RxJS issue.
“I’d probably wish for a state management system that is supported by the Angular team. State management can be difficult using existing libraries and I feel like you guys could come up with a great answer to that problem,” he said.
“Will Le Mière good point! With Signals we’re providing a more explicit component-level state management. Signals combined with services offer app-level state management as well,” Gechev responded. “Many people prefer RxJS-based state management so that’s why we’d not force people into one option, but my personal preference would be services + signals.”
Image via https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/Oprah-You-Get-A
But Gechev is not Oprah Winfrey, so not everybody is getting everything on their wish list. For instance, Daniel Zohar, a senior software engineer, suggested that Angular replace Webpack with the bundler esbuild and Evan You’s local development server Vite. He also wanted support for microfrontends.
“Daniel Zohar done :),” Gechev said, but when it comes to microfrontends, he responded, “You probably want to use Nx.” (We assume he’s referring to the tool created by Nrwl, which provides support for modern frameworks such as Angular, React, and more.)
Angular 18 was released in May.
Drupal Survey: Going Headless Hurts
A majority of Drupal users are happy with the open source content management system, according to a Drupal Developer Survey 2024 conducted by managed services firm IronStar. In fact, 91% said they’ll be using Drupal in 12 months — a jump from last year’s 84%.
The majority — 60% of the 648 responses from 65 different countries — only use Drupal. But of the remaining 40%, WordPress dominated as an alternative, with 54% adoption. It was followed by Laravel at 25%,
Image via Drupal Survey 2024
In 2023, 44% of respondents said they had worked on headless Drupal sites. In 2024, that number grew by 3%, but it’s worth noting that going headless was rated as moderately difficult by 44% and either somewhat or most difficult by an additional 36%.
Image via the Drupal Developer Survey 2024
Turborepo 2.0 Available
Tuesday, Vercel released version 2.0 of its Turborepo, a high-performance build system that’s designed for JavaScript and TypeScript codebases. Written in Go, Turborepo is used to manage large-scale monorepos.
The update includes a new terminal user interface with interactive tasks and clearer logs, as well as a dependency-aware task watcher for any tooling in the repository, according to a blog post about the release. There’s also new documentation and licensing updates — it’s been upgraded to the MIT license. Vercel also has added a long-term support policy that states major versions of Turborepo will be supported for two years from the release date of the next major version.
Kong AI Gateway Now Generally Available
Last week, Liam Crilly, a senior director of product management at F5, gave us the down-low on the similarities and difference between an AI gateway and an API gateway.
“AI gateways are frequently compared to API gateways,” he wrote. “Managing APIs is a critical part of AI gateways, which are almost always designed to interact with external AI providers such as large clouds or OpenAI.”
One example we’ve previously covered is Kong’s open source plugin, called AI Gateway, for its API management platform, Kong Gateway. This week, Kong promoted its AI gateway to generally available status.
“Kong AI Gateway can also be provisioned entirely in the cloud as a dedicated SaaS service with Kong’s new Konnect Dedicated Cloud Gateways offering,” the company said in a statement. “Kong AI Gateway supports a wide range of use cases to help accelerate the adoption and rollout of new AI applications into production.”
API Platform Management Tool Debuts Beta
Speaking of API management, Blackbird is a new API platform management tool from cloud development tool company Ambassador. The company is looking for developers and development teams interested in joining the Blackbird beta.
It hopes to release Blackbird later this year, the company stated in a press release.
The post Angular To Make RxJS Optional; Drupal Devs on Going Headless appeared first on The New Stack.
What one feature would developers like to see in Angular? Minko Gechev found out. Also, CMS Drupal survey reveals going headless hurts.