The Future of AngularJS In the Banking Industry

If someone asked you to name the best food in the world, your answer would almost certainly be dependent on your personal experiences as well as your tastes and preferences. More importantly, you would neither be wrong nor correct, irrespective of what you choose.

This is the situation that confounds developers when you ask them to name the best programming language. As with food, every programming language has its merits and demerits and the one you end up using will depend on your intended end product as well as your own preferences.

There are few industries that move as fast as the tech industry. In fact, even its sub sectors change so quickly it feels like something new showing up every day. For instance, new computer programming frameworks and languages keep being introduced, disrupting the way of doing things in the tech world.

Today, there is a handsome number of programming languages developers can use to create both backend and frontend applications. The majority of the computer programming languages that we use today were real disruptors when they were first introduced. These include Backbone.js, JQuery and AngularJS.

What’s more, the existing technologies are themselves always evolving and are nothing like what they looked like during their inception years. The change constant in tech is always exciting but also brings with it challenges for developers, who sometimes have to go back to class to stay competitive enough to provide real-world solutions for their clients.

Nothing gets entrenched in the tech world before an (often better) alternative shows up to replace it. As TNW noted recently, the next big disruptor is likely to be software intelligence, which is increasingly being incorporated to programming languages, frameworks and platforms. Yet, as we noted in another article, the banking industry continues its resistance towards opening its arms wide to welcome new technologies.

Nevertheless, with all its resistance, AngularJS is curving a future in the banking sector that is worth talking about. The programming language, which has excited many developers may just be what the financial industry needed to finally get its groove back in a marketplace that threatens its existential conservatism.

What is AngularJS?

AngularJS is a JavaScript structural framework designed for dynamic web applications. It makes it possible for developers to use HTML as their template language while letting them spread HTML syntax to better express the components of an application.

According to its creators, AngularJS is what HTML would have looked like if it had been created to be used for applications instead of web pages.

While HTML remains a great language for static web documents, it fares poorly when being used to create applications. In fact, using HTML to build applications means developers have to figure out how to trick a browser to do what they need done. Compare that to AngularJS which allows for easy movement of data within a single-page application.

What’s more, AngularJS makes it possible to dynamically update an application’s view as changes take place in its data, without having to create specific listener code. Essentially, this client side technology enhances the functionality of JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

Using angular eliminates the need to redraw a list whenever there’s a data change because the Document Object Model (DOM) reflects any data change that takes place.

Typically, AngularJS is used to create complex applications that need to have rich presentation layers in addition to interaction points for users. While you can use it to create static websites, that is not what it was built to create.

The following are some of the key features you will find in AngularJS

• Easy two-way data binding
• Dependency injection
• Declarative HTML approach
• End to end unit testing/integration testing
• Reusable components
• Form validation
• MVVM/MVC design pattern
• Templating
• Expressions
• Modules
• Routing
• Services
• Filters

How popular is AngularJS?

The web development world took note when Google rewrote the entirety of its front-end using AngularJS. The company, which maintains AngularJS, also used it to write its PS3 app. This alone should give you a reason to care about this framework.

That said, AngularJS is not only popular within Google, it is also beloved among many developers. As a matter of fact, it is searched more than 16 times the total number of searches for React framework, the second most popular framework by search volume.

Some of the big companies that have adopted AngularJS include HBO, NASA, General Motors, Virgin America, Netflix, Nike, MSNBC and Sony.

Why many web developers are choosing AngularJS

• It is easier to understand
• It requires less code
• It is more maintainable
• It is cleaner
• It is intuitive for those familiar with HTML
• It is more modular
• It enjoys strong and active development by Google
• It has an active community
• It allows parallel development
• It has notable extensibility and testability
• It is comprehensive – provides adequate solutions for frontend development allowing developers to find bugs before application users do
• Created by professional engineers, it is a high-quality framework

AngularJS and the banking industry

Around three years back, it emerged that the banking industry may be embracing agile development by incorporating AngularJS into bank Java programs. Many developers saw this as an announcement of the return of a sparkle of freshness to banking development.

It was agreeable that the introduction of AngularJS to banking development would usher in a new dawn for the sector with continuous and agile delivery. There are a number of reasons why AngularJS is the perfect framework for banking development. These include:

Application performance

With AngularJS, web applications load at lightning speeds even in locations with poor infrastructure

Software extensibility

Banks need a framework that swiftly and neatly responds to the needs of their customers

MIT license

Many financial institutions hesitate from acting on their instinct to use open source projects because of the licensing hurdles that dog most open source projects. AngularJS does not have this problem. It uses the MIT software license.

This popular and extremely permissive proprietary license is compatible to GPL and allows reuse as long as it is within proprietary programs. To developers, therefore, AngularJS gives them a lot of leeway with the code.

Looking into the future

In just a few years, AngularJS has become the go-to framework for web developers. It’s now widely embraced JavaScript framework allows for the creation of highly professional and complex websites, making it a favorite for many financial institutions.

AngularJS has rejuvenated the banking industry by making it possible for industry players to offer their customers the complex services they do offline at lightning speeds and with fewer bugs.

Finally, an industry that has been skeptical of new technologies and slow to take them up has appreciated AngularJS framework enough to trust AngularJS development firms with the task of creating for them professional websites and applications that are intuitive and easy to use.

And because its use is steadily rising, any organization investing in AngularJS has great confidence that the framework will pay off by the end of the next decade. Bank executives are particularly over the moon; the possibilities have presented themselves via AngularJS will revolutionize the banking industry’s online presence.

The powerful, complex and complicated frontend applications they have always wanted to create for their customers are now a reality. And they will achieve this through a web development framework that their developers have come to love. For this reason, you can expect AngularJS to become more popular in months and years to come.