The team behind Angular has decided to jump from Angular 2 to Angular 4. So if you're waiting for Angular 3, it's not going to happen.

Angular is a framework for building JavaScript apps and dynamic web pages. It has gained widespread support, partially because it's a good framework, partially because it's being developed by Google. The change in numbering is mainly to ensure that the new version has the same version number as the Angular version 4 router that will be used with the release when it is available. 

The router is designed to deal with the problems associated with managing state transitions on the web, including the need to include state information in the URL, and to load applications in partial bundles on demand. The Angular router lets you specify the application state declaratively. It also deals with the management of state transitions including the URL, and to load components on demand.

Angular 2 was a major rewrite and introduced a lot of breaking changes, but announcing the new version at the recent NG-BE 2016 Angular conference in Belgium, Google's Igor Minar, lead Angular developer at Google, said that going forward, the steps will be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

When Angular 2 was released in September after two years of intense development, it took the form of a major rewrite, and at that time the development team said they would also be switching to semantic versioning (SemVar).

SemVar is the scheme whereby products are named as produce x.y.z, where x is the major version, y the minor version, and x the patch number. You get a new patch version every week consisting only of bug fixes, not new features. A new minor version is wheeled out every month. It can have new features but doesn't have breaking changes.  A major version will be created every six months, having new features that might introduce breaking changes.

In a blog post on the Angularjs blog by Juri Strumpflohner, the original creator of Angular.js, he said that:

"Changing from version 2 to version 4, 5, … won’t be like changing from Angular 1. It won’t be a complete rewrite, it will simply be a change in some core libraries that demand a major SEMVER version change. Also, there will be proper deprecation phases to allow developers to adjust their code."

The blog post also said that:

"Internally at Google, the Angular team uses a tool for handling automatic upgrades, even of breaking changes. This is still something that has to be planned in more detail, but the team is working hard on making this tool generally available, most probably in 2017 in time for Angular 5."

Other features of the new version announced in the keynote are better Angular compiler errors, and Angular itself is smaller and faster.

More Information

Angular Site

AngularJS Blog

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AngularJS 2.0 Is Radically Different

Udemy's Angular 2-The Complete Guide Course Review 

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