Angular, sometimes called “Angular 2+” to distinguish it from its predecessor, is a web application framework released by Google in 2016. It was not an upgrade of AngularJS but a complete rewrite that broke compatibility, redesigning the framework around modern JavaScript, a component model, and the TypeScript language. Its source lives at github.com/angular/angular, and its documentation is published at angular.dev.
The framework is built on components: self-contained units that pair a template, styling, and logic. As the official overview puts it, “Angular components make it easy to split your code into well-encapsulated parts.” An application is assembled as a tree of these components, each responsible for a region of the interface, which made large codebases easier to organize and reason about than the directive-and-controller structure of the original AngularJS.
Angular adopted TypeScript as its primary language, giving developers static types, interfaces, and tooling support across the whole framework. It also leaned heavily on RxJS and the observable pattern for handling asynchronous data such as HTTP responses and user events, treating streams of values as first-class objects that components could subscribe to and transform.
A central part of the Angular experience is its command-line tool, the Angular CLI. The documentation describes it as letting developers “get your project running in under a minute with the commands you need to grow into a deployed production application,” scaffolding projects, generating components, running tests, and producing optimized builds. Over successive major versions the CLI moved to modern build tooling such as Vite and esbuild, keeping build times short even for projects with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Maintained on a regular release cadence by Google, Angular remains a major choice for large enterprise front-end applications.