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Angular 101: 5 Surefire Ways to Clean up Your Angular JS Codebase

Nowadays, Angular is one of the most popular frameworks for building front-end and cross-platform web applications. It provides a lot of distinctive

Nowadays, Angular is one of the most popular frameworks for building front-end and cross-platform web applications. It provides a lot of distinctive features, such as a dependency injection framework, a routing system, form handling, etc. It also compels you to use both RxJS and TypeScript. It’s already a part of the ecosystem. 

Although Angular is introduced as a powerful framework with a broad toolkit, it’s very difficult to master. It is very difficult to clean the code checklist in one attempt.

There are many ways to keep your Angular JS Codebase clean, which includes writing clean and production-efficient Angular codes.

The ways for cleaning up your code are described in the following points:

  1. Cultivate a Tidy Project Architecture

Here, the configuration of directories, components, and project files start the entire life cycle of the project. Components, structured abruptly, will make for disconsolate development experience.

The challenge is that the scope of the code base for most basic AngularJS project can be massive. Therefore, it’s strongly suggested that you ease yourself into a medium of this burden by maintaining and establishing proper project architecture. 

It starts to consider how the business logic of your project will be configured utilizing the primary building blocks of Angular. Although these are specially designed for Angular 2, they can be implemented for Angular 8, the latest version. 

  • Modules – Angular modules are simply classes that are used to disperse your application into logical blocks.
  • Templates – The templates that are used in Angular are altered forms of HTML. These Angular template describe how the application provides interference.  
  • Data Binding – It allows the binding of the data between the DOM and the underlying components. It depends on the syntax used within the templates. 
  • Metadata – It’s defined as a collection of data that introduces a class. And the class is used to inform that the class definition that follows is also a particular type of class. 
  • Components – These are similar to controllers in another popular MVC framework. These are used to create the user interface within your application.   
  • Services – A service is defined as a class, which is the most generic part of an Angular application.

2. Exploit a Task Runner

For the JavaScript application development, there is a task runner available called Task Runner. It essentially defines a tool that automates several menial tasks that you would otherwise need to perform regularly. The automation, offered by a task runner like Grunt, reduces not only the workflow but also eliminates many unintentional errors done by human beings.

Grunt can do many tasks, and some are described below:

  • Best Price Hints – After alteration of the code, Grunt will analyze the output of the potential changes.
  • Minification – Most of the web applications “minify” their combined JavaScript files to speed up the browser load times.
  • Less Compilation – It will automatically compile any CSS-style framework files into actual CSS.
  • Live Reload – It has the ability to reload your browser automatically when the changes are made. 

It has a massive plug-in directory that contains a plethora of potential tasks depending on your needs. 

3. Exercise Proper Style Guidelines

Any programming language, like AngularJS, can be written in a variety of styles and ways. The newly updated style guides used by the AngularJS community is advisable. It is highly recommended that you try to follow the best style guidelines for your documentation.   

Especially, at the time of using the latest version of AngularJS, Angular 2, these guidelines are now considered as a part of the official AngularJS documentation.

4. Automate Your Testing

Grunt can be used to help you automate several tasks during the development stages with the help of heavily growing popularity focused on test-driven development (TDD.) There has not been a better time to get into the habit of using a test number tool to automate and speed up all your testing requirements.

5. Utilize Helper Modules

Similar to libraries or other plug-ins for any programming frameworks, modules are packaged code components that provide additional functions out of the box. There are various sources available where you can find such modules. A couple of these are ngmodules.org and AngularUI. It contains JQuery frameworks. Another type of module called UI-Router is a popular way to implement the client-side router easily.  

Author Bio: Sunil Joshi
Sunil Joshi is an avid designer cum developer passionate about solving complex UX challenges across digital businesses. He is a trendsetter in the field of data visualization and dashboard design and has been lauded for his clean and minimalist design aesthetic. He co-founded WrapPixel, design and admin dashboard template marketplace in 2016 with an aim to bring great design and clean code within easy reach of everyone.