AngularJS is growing quickly in the JavaScript developing community. Here's how to get started. AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript MVC framework initially developed by Google to give a dynamic presence to HTML web content and apps. It's an intuitive and customizable platform, giving developers the ability to add and remove components as needed. AngularJS has been rising steadily in popularity since 2013 and it's now being used by a number of high-traffic websites. It's found on sites like YouTube, Vevo and HTML5 Ninja, as well as web apps like Metawidget and PhoneCat.

Why Are Developers Switching to AngularJS?

AngularJS provides a number of powerful features that help developers build more quickly and accurately, reducing the amount of code they need to write. It includes a number of directives, which add new functions and let you create templates that can respond instantly to changing situations. AngularJS is also very flexible when it comes to server communication. As long as it can be served through a RESTful web API, AngularJS can be integrated with any server-side software. It's also a good choice to use when building single-page applications because it provides a solid framework to build a system of networked templates.

The Basics of AngularJS

AngularJS uses special directives, controllers and two-way data bindings to quickly build and modify code. Including it in HTML code is simple and can be done with a bit of extra coding. Write your opening HTML tag in the following way to activate AngularJS for that page: Then, inside your tags, including That's all it takes to initialize AngularJS for an HTML document. Now let's take a look at an example of two-way data binding. With the following code, a text input box is created, which asks for a name, as well as an output box that dynamically displays that name. Put this in the body of the document:

In this example, we are creating a controller in the input text box called yourName with the "ng-model" command. This will bind the text in the input box to yourName. Later, the {{yourName}} command is used to display the text that is bound to the yourName controller. The result is a dynamic output field, which displays the text in the input box as it is typed in real-time. As more developers build with AngularJS, it will grow to take on more functions and become even more useful. AngularJS is a powerful framework with a lot of potential. In this coming year we'll see what it can really do.Photo Credit: Dmitry Baranovskiy via Flickr.

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