| Angular and Wiz To Merge |
| Written by Ian Elliot |
| Wednesday, 27 March 2024 |
|
Two web development frameworks used at Google are merging. One, Angular is open source and widely known, while the other, Wiz, is an internal web framework developed and used by Google for some of its internal projects, including Search, Workspace and YouTube and is not publicly available. News of the ongoing merger was initially given in the keynote at the recent NG Conf 2024. Held this year in Salt Lake City and online, this is an annual two day event for the Angular community. The news was then posted on X by Sarah Drasner Director of Engineering at Google where part of her remit is Web Infrastructure, including Angular.
Sarah posted several more tweets explaining why this is happening and what impact it is having: As the web calls for richer and richer experiences, but also performance and latency guarantees, we noticed that these frameworks, which historically served different usecases actually have strengths that could be shared. Merging two frameworks is complex, as you might imagine, but this work is already underway! Angular Signals as you have seen them are now powering Wiz, and properties like YouTube! On the other side, you'll start to see impressive improvements to Angular's performance as it gleans from Wiz!
In the Ng Conf keynote Jeremy Elbourn noted that both Angular and Wiz have existed in some form for over 10 years and that in beginning were fairly distinct with Wiz applications tending to be more consumer-focused, especially for products that were extremely latency sensitive while Angular applications tended to be highly interactive and enterprise- or business-focused. Over time, however, the lines between the two types of UI they started to blur and Google developers working with Wiz wanted more features like those in Angular and developers working with Angular, not only Googlers but also those in the wider community, wanted more features from Wiz. With the two different Frameworks converging on very similar ideas people at Google were beginning to be concerned about the duplication of effort. Taking up the story Minko Gechev explained how it was Signals, a new feature introduced in Angular 16 and fully implemented in Angular 17 released in November 2023, that was the catalyst leading to collaboration between two teams of developers. Last year the Stars aligned and we struck upon some serendipity. Just as we were looking to build our Signal Primitives for Angular, Wiz was looking at doing the exact same thing and we were able to say what if we shared. Even better there was product team that was super enthusiastic to collaborate with both Angular and Wiz on these shared Signal Primitives to get an initial version running in production on a pretty aggressive timeline. The team in question is revealed to be YouTube and that building on that collaboration, You Tube is currently in the midst of one of its largest ever migrations to Wiz's new reactive rendering system, which is entirely built around Angular signals. The keynote later introduces Angular's visual re-branding - with this being the new banner and shield.
Related ArticlesAngular 17 Adds Deferrable Views Angular 16 Improves Reactivity To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. 
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 27 March 2024 ) |
