Component-Based User Interfaces

Although we'll cover a lot of Angular-related topics in this book, the focus will be mainly on creating component-based user interfaces. It's one thing to understand a framework like Angular, but it's a whole different thing to establish an effective workflow using a component-based architecture. In this book, I'll try to explain the core concepts behind Angular components and how we can leverage this architecture to create modern, efficient, and maintainable user interfaces.

Besides learning all the necessary concepts behind Angular, together, we will create a task-management application from scratch. This will allow us to explore different approaches to solve common UI problems using the component system that is provided by Angular.

In this chapter, we will take a look at how component-based user interfaces help us build greater applications. Over the course of this book, we will build an Angular application together, where we will use the component-based approach to its full potential. This chapter will also introduce you to the technologies that are used in this book.

The topics that we will cover in this chapter are as follows:

• An introduction to component-based user interfaces
• Encapsulation and composition using component-based user interfaces
• Evolution of UI frameworks
• The standard web components
• An introduction to the Angular component system
• Writing your first Angular component
• Basics of NgModule
• An overview and history of ECMAScript and TypeScript
• ECMAScript 7 decorators as meta annotations
• An introduction to Node.js-based tooling using Angular CLI