AngularDart 8 Roadmap

[GZGavinZhao]

This is an incomplete list that I can think of on the top of my head, and I'll come back here to add more things. Feel free to suggest anything more!

For now, I don't expect there to be breaking changes in existing codebases that are using null safety.

• infra
  • Establish a commit message standard (melos?) (Setup melos #14).
  • Setup CI for Firefox, not just Chrome/Chromium. #52
• angular
  • Find out a new name to publish our forks (Rename forked packages for publishing on pub #8).
  • Re-enable all the skipped tests in _tests/ (most of them have been resolved) (Re-enable all the skipped tests in _tests/ #9).
  • Migrate codebase to 2.17 language features. Currently, we're only compatible with Dart 2.17.
  • Fix all the static analysis warnings. (refactor!: fixing all static analysis warnings #31)
  • (Optional) HTML template intellisense/autocompletion (nganalyzer).
  • (Optional) Investigate PostCSS integration for Tailwind CSS, etc.
  • (Optional) Investigate easy asset packaging.
  • (Optional) Investigate easy interop of npm packages and bundle them into the final JavaScript.
• angular_test
  • Static analysis regarding type inference in NgTestBed (NgTestBed can't infer type of createXXFactory() #5).
• angular_components
  • Nuke all the unnecessary branches and rename the entire package to ngcomponents.
  • Migrate to null safety (Null safety migration angular_components#35).
  • Fix all the static analysis warnings.
• site-angulardart
  • Update all examples to Angular 7/8.
  • (Optional) Drop Jekyll, use something else. Our tooling is getting old (e.g. grinder, jekyll-assets) and slow. We can even use AngularDart to write that whole website and use ngpuppeteer to pre-render it. Hugo. Verified that it is theoretically doable, design in progress. Work in progress: Migrate contents to new website website#9
• misc
  • (Optional) Consider writing another component library that is much easier to understand/imitate than angular_components? So far everything in the ecosystem is around Material Design. We can utilize existing Angular TS libraries to drastically reduce the work, such as ng-zorro.

[ykmnkmi]

Old pipes and animations in Component?

[ykmnkmi]

Can we also deprecate and remove ReflectiveInjector, bootstrapStatic, runAppLegacy and runAppLegacyAsync? How it would look.

[GZGavinZhao]

@ykmnkmi I'm okay with that. Feel free to send in a PR!

[insinfo]

@GZGavinZhao
Congratulations for your dedication to this project, I would particularly like to be contributing to this project but I haven't had the time. I deal with AngularDart projects on a day to day basis, but at the company where I work we still have a lot of projects stuck in AngularDart 6 and dart 2.12. I really appreciate the idea of not being stuck with AngularDart Components (MaterialDesign), I use a lot of custom components that make use of CSS Bootstrap.

[ykmnkmi]

@GZGavinZhao looking at the "Fix all static analysis warnings" and "constant_identifier_names" rule (152 cases), can I deprecate public members with names like this "OnPush" and replace them with new ones?

[GZGavinZhao]

@ykmnkmi No problem, go for it :)

[ykmnkmi]

@GZGavinZhao I thinks analyzer warnings task is done.
What you think about migrating all packages and tests to Dart 3 and analyzer 6?

[GZGavinZhao]

@GZGavinZhao I thinks analyzer warnings task is done. What you think about migrating all packages and tests to Dart 3 and analyzer 6?

@ykmnkmi Good idea! The only caution I would have is that if we migrate to Dart 3, we either have to remove non-null-safe support entirely, or find a way to disable/isolate it during testing. In my opinion, the 2nd option is more desirable, but I'm not sure how difficult it would be. If the 2nd option is not possible, then we will likely have to remove non-null-safety support from AngularDart.

Side note, Angular's runtime code is already theoretically compatible with Dart 3 as indicated by the Pub packages page and it seems that @jodinathan was able to get it working as well; the only potential blocker here is the Angular Compiler, as explained in the previous paragraph.

[ykmnkmi]

Currently, I'm bumping all package versions to the minimal version that has migrated to Dart 3.0 or the latest pre-3.0 version and fixing errors and analysis warnings.

For example:

# ngtest/pubspec.yaml
dependencies:
  collection: ^1.17.2
  # ...

dev_dependencies:
  build_runner: ^2.4.6
  build_test: ^2.2.0
  build_web_compilers: ^4.0.4
  test: ^1.24.4
  # ...

One package that is holding up migration is mockito, as I am waiting for it to update. It's a dev dependency in ngforms, ngrouter, and _tests.

[insinfo]

@ykmnkmi @GZGavinZhao

Is it possible to keep AngularDart 8 compatible with dart 2.18, 2.19 and 3?
I'm asking this because many of my projects are stuck on dart 2.18.x at the moment

[ykmnkmi]

@insinfo I think it would be better to backporting updates to v7.x branch, keeping it with Dart 2.x and analyzer 5.x build stack.

[insinfo]

@ykmnkmi
I'm working on bringing some of the projects to dart 3.1.5, due to a bug I found in dart 2.18.* but from what I've seen, ngdart 8.0.0-dev.0 still doesn't work with dart 3, right? What package prevents AngularDart from working with Dart 3?

[ykmnkmi]

@insinfo dart-lang/mockito#706 and tests in _tests, ngforms and ngrouter.

[insinfo]

I forked ngdart here to try to make it work on dart 3.1.5, made some dependency changes, set it to sdk: '>=3.0.0 <4.0.0', and made modifications to the mixins classes and it seems to be working well on dart 3.1.5 in a large project. I have no knowledge of the structure of the angular project, I don't know what the "goldens" package and the "_tests" package are, I ran the "ngast" and "ngcompiler" package tests and it passed all the tests

https://github.com/insinfo/angular_8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LruIQZ77GIw

[insinfo]

the "ngforms", "ngrouter", "ngast" and "ngcompiler" package could be integrated with the "ngdart" package to reduce dependencies on many packages and facilitate maintenance in just one package

[GZGavinZhao]

@insinfo @ykmnkmi and I have been working on #68, where functionality wise it is working (browser tests all passed) but we're still fixing tests (compiler tests in _tests were failing because of null-safety issues).

[insinfo]

the "ngforms", "ngrouter", "ngast" and "ngcompiler" package could be integrated with the "ngdart" package to reduce dependencies on many packages and facilitate maintenance in just one package

I did a proof of concept here, I modified the ngdart package to include the ngast, ngcompiler, ngforms, ngrouter and ngtest packages. And I used it on the project I'm working on and it seems to be working well. now my project depends on just one package

https://github.com/insinfo/angular_8

[ykmnkmi]

@insinfo, I also think about it. As for goldens, I use goldens to view changes in generated JS in the process of changing AngularDart internals.

[dukefirehawk]

For those that would like to run ngdart with dart 3.2, I use the following pubspec.yml in my project without any issues. Granted I don't use ngcomponents. Instead use Bulma with ngdart. Light weight and works seamlessly.

name: myportal
version: 1.0.0
description: An ngdart web portal
publish_to: none
environment:
  sdk: ">=3.0.0 <4.0.0"
dependencies:
  ngdart: ^8.0.0-dev.2
  ngrouter: ^4.0.0-dev.1
  ngforms: ^5.0.0-dev.1
  crypto: ^3.0.1
dev_dependencies:
  ngtest: ^5.0.0-dev.0
  build_runner: ^2.1.2
  build_test: ^2.1.3
  build_web_compilers: ^4.0.0
  test: ^1.16.5
  sass_builder: ^2.1.3
  webdev: ^3.0.0
  lints: ^3.0.0
dependency_overrides:
  build_modules: ^5.0.0

[insinfo]

@duquefirehawk

If you overwrite only the build_modules package, a warning message will appear, so that this message does not appear, you must also overwrite the analyzer package

[WARNING] ngdart on web/main.dart: Your current `analyzer` version may not fully support your current SDK version.

Analyzer language version: 3.1.0
SDK language version: 3.2.0

Please update to the latest `analyzer` version (6.4.1) by running
`dart pub upgrade`.

If you are not getting the latest version by running the above command, you
can try adding a constraint like the following to your pubspec to start
diagnosing why you can't get the latest version:

dev_dependencies:
  analyzer: ^6.4.1

environment:
  sdk: ^3.2.1

dependencies:
  ngdart: ^8.0.0-dev.2
  ngrouter: ^4.0.0-dev.1
  ngforms: ^5.0.0-dev.1 

dev_dependencies:  
  build_runner: ^2.1.2
  build_test: ^2.1.3
  build_web_compilers: ^4.0.0
  lints: ^2.1.0
  test: ^1.24.0

dependency_overrides:
  build_modules: ^5.0.0
  analyzer: ^6.4.1

[GZGavinZhao]

Oh well I guess it's time for a pre-release for Dart 3. I will publish one this weekend.

[dukefirehawk]

Maybe a pre-release for ngcomponents too while you are at it :)

[GZGavinZhao]

Dart 3 pre-release has been published, version are as follows:

dependencies:
  ngdart: 8.0.0-dev.4
  ngrouter: 4.0.0-dev.3
  ngforms: 5.0.0-dev.3

dev_dependencies:
  ngtest: 5.0.0-dev.3

# internal packages
others:
  ngast: 3.0.0-dev.2
  ngcompiler: 3.0.0-dev.3

Will publish a pre-release ngcomponents shortly.