When we founded theCodeCampus.de in 2014 we had some year’s experience in developing angular 1 applications. We also had a few years’ experience of doing trainings for Eclipse RCP.

Last year we added our angular 2 trainings, months before angular 2 was finally released! We were really surprised how well it was received, but also faced some challenges!

Read on, if you’re interested in what happened in the last year, and the interesting things we learned in this journey!

1) 99% bookings went from angular 1 to angular 2

This is something we didn’t expect. The years before, we did many very successful trainings for angular 1 basic and advanced. As soon as we put the angular 2 training on our website nearly all of the bookings went to this training. Again, let me tell you, angular 2 was not finally released at the time, and no one from google did say anything else than “it will come in 2016”.

2) Change in the audience

Attendees to our angular 1 trainings were mostly web developers which had a jQuery like background and wanted to learn how to write professional web apps.

In our angular 2 trainings, we felt a definite change in this. More and more attendees are not having a background as a web developer, but often also come from the Java or .NET world.

Why is this??

I think, we currently see a big change from Desktop Applications to Web Applications. Also, Web Applications are used in fields, where in the past only native programming languages could be used. Now we have browsers in nearly every device.

3) Steep Learning curve

Compared to angular 1, the learning curve of angular 2 is much much steeper. This is not only my personal experience; we also see it in our trainings. Many attendees (even more when no web developers) struggle with the complexity of creating angular 2 applications.

For us as a training provider, this means we have to adapt the way we do our trainings and the webapp which is developed in the training. As our trainings have a maximum capacity of 8 persons per trainer, we can help every attendee at his level of knowledge.

4) Better IDE support is helping

The IDE support for angular 2 and typescript is much better compared to angular 1. This is also because typescript as a typed language makes it much easier for the IDE developers to give proper support.

As experienced web developers we often underestimate the value of this. But for beginners it is indeed very heflpful to have autocompletion in the HTML for TypeScript properties and methods. We do have the best experience with the tools from JetBrains.

5) Angular 2 is not (only) a Web Framework

As I said above the type of attendees in our trainings changed. And so, does the scope of the applications they are building. Yes, many are still developing traditional internet / intranet webapps, but many are going in a more native-like direction. Writing apps for devices nobody thought of some years ago.

As the rendering layer in angular 2 is not strictly bound to HTML, we are already now seeing frameworks like native script, which runs as a native iOS or android application.

We like it!!!

Of course, the learning curve of angular 2 is steep. But there are so many things you can achieve with angular 2. We truly believe that angular 2 is the way to go!