Angular 21 has been released with experimental support for Signal Forms, a developer preview of Angular Aria, and the ability to use Angular's MCP Server via AI Agents.
Angular is an open source TypeScript-based web application framework that can be used for building JavaScript apps and dynamic web pages. Its popularity increased following work on its development by Google. Recent versions have added features including reactivity with Signals, and support for Zoneless applications.
The first improvement of note is the inclusion of Signal Forms, an experimental library that can be used to manage form state by building on the reactive foundations of Signals. With Signal Forms, the Form model is defined by a signal that automatically syncs with the form fields bound to it. This supports full type-safety for accessing form fields, and built-in centralized schema-based validation logic.
You can now bind the fields to the template using the [field] directive, and binding to custom components is signal based. The Signal Forms API is still experimental.
The next improvement is accessible components via a developer preview of a new modern library for common UI patterns. Angular Aria provides a set of 8 UI patterns encompassing 13 components that are completely unstyled and can be customized with your own styles. It uses modern Angular directives and is signal based. Angular Aria also includes complex components that you can style yourself, such as multi-level standalone menus.
The next change is the addition of more tools for AI agents with Angular's MCP server. This was launched in Angular v20.2, and is now stable. It provides a set of tools to give AI agents the right context about modern Angular and your application. It can be used to gain general context, find up-to-date information, update your application, or teach you Angular.
The Vitest test runner has been promoted to stable in this release, though Karma and Jasmine are still fully supported.
Finally, new Angular applications are not including zone.js by default anymore . Earlier versions of Angular used zone.js, a library that patches browser APIs, to keep track of changes in applications. This means templates automatically change as the user performs actions in your application, but zone.js does have performance drawbacks, especially for high-complexity applications. The Angular team says that with signals driving modern Angular state management, zone.js is no longer needed for change detection. Zoneless change detection is therefore now fully supported. The team says that in 2024, more than half of the brand new Angular applications inside Google were built with the Zoneless change detection strategy, and the team's research shows many developers are writing Zoneless apps. In view of this, zone.js and its features will no longer be included by default in Angular applications in v21. This provides benefits such as better Core Web Vitals, native async-await, ecosystem compatibility, reduced bundle size, easier debugging and better control.
...is entirely justified. While we all go mad for Rust and its steep learning curve, we may have missed the most important thing to happen to C/C++ since they were invented - Fil-C.
