Angular 18 brings a host of exciting features and enhancements designed to improve performance, developer experience, and the overall capabilities of the framework. Here’s an in-depth look at what's new in Angular 18:

Built-in Control Flow

One of the most notable updates in Angular 18 is the stabilization of the built-in control flow. This feature enhances performance and type checking for conditional rendering and loops within templates, streamlining the way developers manage their component templates.

Enhanced Hydration and Server-Side Rendering

Angular 18 introduces several improvements in hydration, making server-side rendering more efficient and user-friendly:

• Full Hydration Support for Angular Material: All Angular Material components now support hydration fully.
• Event Replay: This new feature records user interactions during the non-interactive hydration phase and replays them once the application is fully loaded and interactive. This ensures no user interaction is lost during hydration.
• Internationalization (i18n) Support: Hydration support for i18n blocks is now available, allowing developers to handle multiple languages more effectively during server-side rendering.

Improved Forms API

Angular 18 brings enhancements to the Forms API, particularly for reactive forms:

• Event Properties for AbstractControl: New event properties have been added to the AbstractControl class, enabling developers to handle form events such as pristine, touched, status change, reset, and submit through observables. This makes form management more intuitive and powerful.

Dynamic Routing Enhancements

Routing in Angular 18 has been made more flexible with the ability to use functions for redirects. This allows for more dynamic and context-aware navigation logic. Developers can now pass a function to the redirectTo property, making it easier to handle complex routing scenarios.

Partial Hydration

Partial hydration in Angular 18 allows for incremental hydration of server-rendered content, improving performance by reducing the amount of JavaScript that needs to be executed upfront. This feature supports defer blocks as partial hydration boundaries, which can be configured per-block and per-application basis​:citation.

Developer Experience Improvements

Several new tools and commands have been introduced to enhance the developer experience:

• New ng dev Command: Angular 18 introduces the ng dev command, an alternative to ng serve, providing more flexibility in starting the local development server.
• Improved Debugging Tools: Enhancements in Angular DevTools now allow developers to visualize the hydration process, set advanced breakpoints, and inspect real-time data within the Angular framework.

Integration with Google’s Wiz Framework

Angular continues to integrate with Google's internal framework, Wiz, bringing in performance-centric features and further enhancing Angular's capabilities. This merger is expected to introduce new features and optimizations that benefit both frameworks.

Future Enhancements

Looking ahead, Angular 18 sets the stage for several upcoming features, including:

• Unit Testing Modernization: Plans to modernize unit testing tools and introduce web test runners over Karma.
• Route Visualization: Tools to visualize which routes are eagerly or lazily loaded, providing an overview of the application structure for new developers.

Conclusion

Angular 18 is a significant update that brings numerous improvements aimed at enhancing performance, simplifying form handling, and providing a better developer experience. These updates make Angular a more powerful and flexible framework, setting the stage for future innovations.

For more details and to stay updated with Angular's latest features, visit the official Angular blog and check out the detailed posts on Telerik. Happy coding!