When Angular 2 Meets Drupal: Building Web Applications with Progressive Frameworks

User experience is one of the most important parts of website development processes. Website owners should place a particular emphasis on the perfect user experience because today it is a huge trend.

According to statistics, 84% of companies expect to increase their focus on customer experience measurement and metrics.

A great user experience is what draws your visitors in and compels them to stay on your website longer. However, if a website is difficult to use and people can’t find any information, they will leave.

61% of users say that if they didn’t find what they were looking for right away on a mobile site, they’d quickly move on to another one.

If you want to create a website with the perfect interactive elements to provide a great user experience on Drupal, but you feel that the platform itself doesn’t give you enough space for creativity, integrate it with Angular.

Let’s find out why these frameworks are a good option.

What is Drupal 8 and What are Its Benefits?

Drupal is a popular open-source website development platform which simplifies the online management of content and users. It's used to make many of the websites and applications we use every day. It has great standard features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security.

Due to its powerful functionality, Drupal provides excellent opportunities for the development of complex websites.

Within 90 days of the release of Drupal 8.0.0, the new version outpaced Drupal 7 by more than 200%.

Drupal was released under the GNU General Public License, which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software.

Thus, Drupal is free to download from Drupal.org. Anyone can modify and extend the platform by adding various extensions, plugins and integrating frameworks, for example, Angular.

Drupal has more than 2,000 free design templates and more than 34,000 free plugins.

Drupal has the following benefits:

• 1. Technically Advanced. Drupal is one the most technically advanced content management systems. Being one of the most powerful tools, it requires some expertise and experience to operate.

• 2. High Performance. Drupal pages load quickly and have fast response time. It is less resource-intensive and requires a less expensive server or hosting setup.

• 3. Customizable. Drupal is highly customizable. The platform may be integrated with many widely available plug-ins, themes and other configurable options to choose from. You can also edit the root files and code directly. Drupal is perfect for those developers who want to make more significant changes and customize the platform the way they want.

• 4. Free of charge. Anyone can download the Drupal software for free on Drupal.org, and install it on a hosting server.

• 5. Flexible Сontent Delivery. Drupal is known for its ability to tag, categorize, and organize complex content.

Drupal is best for complex, advanced, and flexible websites that require complex data organization in addition to online stores for community platform websites with multiple users and. All of these benefits sustain Drupal and help the platform remain highly competitive.

Which Sites Can be Created on Drupal?

Drupal.org writes that Drupal platform is suitable for any type of website creation.

It is ideal for community web portals, personal websites or blogs, E-commerce applications, social networking websites, games and entertainment websites and many more.

Awwwards gathered the best websites examples of Drupal designs.

An Italian restaurant website which is designed in a scrolling manner.

www.ristorantesangenesio.com

A website of a Swiss watch company with background videos

www.girard-perregaux.com

What is Angular 2 and What are Its Benefits?

Angular is a JavaScript framework that helps developers build applications. AngularJS was developed to make applications more interactive for the end user.

It was designed to overcome the limitations of HTML. Its library provides a number of features that make it trivial to implement the complex requirements of modern applications, such as data binding, routing, and animations.

Angular 2 is not an upgrade version of Angular 1, it is a complete rewrite of AngularJS.

Wikipedia says:

“Angular (commonly referred to as “Angular 2+” or “Angular 2″) is a TypeScript-based open-source front-end web application platform led by the Angular Team at Google and by a community of individuals and corporations to address all of the parts of the developer's workflow while building complex web applications. Angular is a complete rewrite from the same team that built AngularJS.”

With the help of Angular 2, you may design applications that present data and manipulate it and make lists of names and data.

Angular 2 also gives you a possibility to store products and design dynamic widgets, control smart forms and create miscellaneous interactive elements.

Angular 2 has the following benefits:

• Simplicity. Angular 2 framework is considered to be simpler than Angular 1 as it has fewer concepts, making it easier to understand.

  The developers who designed Angular 2 took all of the feedback regarding Angular JS and applied it allowing them to produce a development product that was simpler to understand.

  Angular 2 is a more streamlined framework. It allows developers to focus on building JavaScript classes.

  It also provides a much richer development ecosystem. There you can also notice a sophisticated improvements with text editors or IDE’s auto-completion. With Angular 2 it is easier for developers to write more generic JavaScript, and plug it into Angular.

• Mobile Orientation and Performance. Mobile optimization trends allowed developers to create a ground-up redesign of Angular and make the framework more suitable for mobile optimized websites and applications development.

  smartinsights.com

  Angular 2 is designed for development of mobile applications. It is optimized for memory efficiency. It has first-class support for touch events and gestures that work across all devices.

  The goal of this framework is to consolidate development. It allows developers to take one framework and use it for the development of various applications.This makes development with NativeScript, for example, easier. As you can use the same framework to build native applications.

  All the benchmarks that the Angular team is exercising are public and part of the GitHub repo, so anyone can look at them and even run them locally.

• Project Architecture and Maintenance. A GitHub contributor writes that the removal of minification workarounds and rigid prescriptions make maintaining existing applications at Angular 2 simpler.

  The new module system also makes it easier to develop effective tooling that can better reason on larger projects.

Examples of Angular 2 Applications

You can see some examples of using Angular 2 on angularexpo.com.

lbd-pro-angular2.creative-tim.com

A Rhythm Sequencer Made with Angular 2 and TypeScript.

http://www.joeyfarina.com

Where Can Angular 2 be Used with Drupal?

In different types of live weather widgets, live update widgets, and various real-time tracking systems.

For example, wunderground.com has such a weather widget:

In web shops and web carts, where you can get the price in real-time after setting product parameters and automatic calculations.

In various types of listings, e.g. news listings, person databases, and ticket systems.

Within smart forms that calculate some values and update in real-time without having to reload the page.

Wrapping Up

Angular is a JavaScript framework that helps developers build applications. Angular 2 is a complete rewrite of Angular. It is a new progressive framework which gives many opportunities to create a miscellaneous applications on a Drupal platform.

With Angular 2 you may create smart forms, different types of listings, online updating widgets and many other things.

The major benefits of Angular are its simplicity, mobile orientation, performance, and its architecture and maintenance.

Angular 2 can be easily integrated into your Drupal platform. This integration will provide you with the high speed of websites operation and the perfect user experience.