In previous Radar editions, we've been hesitant to give Angular a strong recommendation because it was essentially a new, and on the whole unexciting, framework, sharing only its name with AngularJS, an older framework we loved in days past. In the meantime, Angular, now in version 5, has improved steadily while providing backward compatibility along the way. Several of our teams have Angular applications in production and reportedly, they like what they see. For this reason, we're moving Angular into the Trial ring in this Radar, to signify that some of our teams now consider it a solid choice. Most of our teams, however, still prefer React, Vue or Ember over Angular.
In the previous Radar, we moved AngularJS into the Hold ring (where it remains in this edition). When it comes to Angular 2 , we're seeing mixed messages. Over the past year some teams at ThoughtWorks have used Angular 2 successfully and consider it a solid choice. However, Angular 2 is a rewrite, not an evolution, of AngularJS, and switching from AngularJS to Angular 2 is not much different than switching from AngularJS to another framework. Given the, in our experience, superior contenders such as React.js, Ember.js and Vue.js, we're still hesitant to give Angular 2 a strong recommendation. We do want to highlight, though, that it is not a bad choice, especially if you bought into TypeScript.
