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InfoQ Homepage News AngularJS Officially Reached End of Life

AngularJS Officially Reached End of Life

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After a grace period induced by the current global pandemic, long-term support for AngularJS has been discontinued. While AngularJS will still remain available, its repo will be archived and will receive no more additional updates, including security patches.

Although Google announced AngularJS was entering a long-term period support over three years ago, AngularJS is still in wide use today. This can be explained with the fact that upgrading from AngularJS to its successor, Angular, is no easy task, since Google re-engineered it completely going from version 1 to version 2. Differences between the two frameworks are not minor, starting with the language they require to adopt —JavaScript for AngularJS, TypeScript for Angular— up to the overall architecture, with AngularJS following the MVC paradigm, mobile support, and so on.

With the end of LTS for AngularJS, though, the time has come to start planning how to move away from it. At any moment a new vulnerability could be discovered that requires prompt patching. Likewise, updates to AngularJS could be required to fix incompatibilities with new browser versions or with other frameworks. There are a number of alternatives developers can take into consideration, including AngularJS successor Angular, Vue.js, and React, all options that remain valid today. Of course, being AngularJS MIT-licensed, nothing rules out the possibility the community will fork the repo and keep evolving it.

In fact, such a fork already exists, maintained by the team at XLTS.dev, aiming to provide extended long-term support to any organizations not ready yet to migrate away from AngularJS. The XLTS team announced they are planning to support it until the end of 2026 at least. XLTS provides support contracts aiming to ensure AngularJS remains up-to-date with security patches, breaking changes brought by new browser versions, and jQuery patches. Interestingly, the team at XLTS is made up of previous and current contributors to the Angular project.

Existing projects that use AngularJS will still have access to CDN URLs, npm and bower packages. Likewise, the GitHub repo will provide read-only access to the code, issue, and pull request history.

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Community comments

  • So what are the main alternatives to AngularJs

    by Spencer TT Chirume,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Do you think other js frameworks and libraries will experience a flurry of uptake in the next few weeks and months.

  • Re: So what are the main alternatives to AngularJs

    by Sergio De Simone,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    There are a lot of alternatives to AngularJS, including Angular itself, React, Vue, but there are many more.

    You can give a look at our latest JavaScript and Web Development Trends Report to get an overview of what is moving in that arena (section "Web Development Client-side frameworks / libraries").

    As to your second question, I think it's hard to say how fast teams will move away from AngularJS. Security-wise that should be a priority, at least. But there are a lot of additional constraints usually, and many applications have grown quite complex to be rewritten from scratch easily.

    Basically, I think who wanted to migrate away had a lot of time to do it before this very last moment.
    For most of the other cases, I think side-constraints prevailed to the effect of preventing the migration in the first place, and possibly will still do in this new context. As in, you can always count of the possibility that the framework will not die and the community will keep it at least current with security concerns.
    The rest, which I have no idea how many could be, will surely take the chance to start the migration to a different framework.

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