An updated version of AngularJS, the Google JavaScript framework for creating web apps, has been released, with new features and improvements to animations and transitions.

The team describes AngularJS as:

“what HTML would have been, had it been designed for building web-apps. Declarative templates with data-binding, MVW, MVVM, MVC, dependency ...”

and explains that is is an extensible toolset for building the framework most suited to your application development. (Note: MVW stands for Model View Whatever.)

The improvements to animations and transitions include support for ngClass, class expressions, and callbacks. Animations are now fully class-based which means so long as a CSS class is present in your HTML code, animations can be directly hooked into a working application. An article on yearofmoo is devoted to using the revamped animations. 

The new version also also fixes the bugs from the release candidate and has more informative error messages via a new error message minification service called MinErr. The developers say this gives more insight about error conditions in your app while also reducing code size.

Strict Contextual Escaping is another improvement to this version. Strict Contextual Escaping (SCE) is a mode in which AngularJS requires bindings in certain contexts to result in a value that is marked as safe to use for that context.

Other improvements include track by function to prevent duplicates in ng-repeat; the addition of “Controller As” syntax to access controller instances in templates; Promise A+ compliance so you can use the Promise A+ test suite; and separation of ngRoute into its own module.