While Google and Microsoft may have their own set of grudges (considering how the former ‘exposed’ bugs in later’s software, twice !), but in what would come as a surprise to every tech-enthusiast out there, Google and Microsoft have announced a collaboration, where they will come together to better Google’s next JS Web framework, Angular 2.
Angular is the second iteration of Google’s current JS framework, where in it provides a developer platform to build web applications for mobile and desktop. Angular 2 is currently in an Alpha Preview mode, and can be downloaded from here.
Interestingly, Google has been using AtScript superset of Microsoft Typescript language for development of Angular 2 and while Google uses the name ATScript, it is being said that the search giant will retire ATscript and merge it with Microsoft’s TypeScript, the actual language on which ATScript was originally designed. Google’s ATScript language debuted in October last year.
In the announcement made yesterday, Microsoft’s Jonathan Turner says,
We’re excited to unveil the result of a months-long partnership with the Angular team. This partnership has been very productive and rewarding experience for us, and as part of this collaboration, we’re happy to announce that Angular 2 will now be built with TypeScript.
Among the improvements brought about in TypeScript, one of them is the introduction of a new way to annotate class declarations with metadata. Library and application developers can use these metadata annotations to cleanly separate code from information about the code, such as configuration information or conditional compilation checks.
Microsoft has also added a way to retrieve type information at runtime. When enabled, this will enable developers to do a simple type introspection. To verify code correctness with additional runtime checks. It also enables libraries like Angular to use type information to set up dependency injection based on the types themselves.
While ATScript was originally written in JavaScript and Google’s own DART language, it later introduced many new features like introspection, to TypeScript language.
Microsoft says that it will be releasing a new version of the TypeScript language, the TypeScript 1.5 n the coming weeks, and along with it, growing TypeScript’s tooling support to include more development styles and environments.
