JHipster 6.0.1 & 6.1: Bug fixes and Angular 8

JHipster 6.0.1: Bug fixes

JHipster released version 6.0.1 on May 10, 2019. As the first patch release a week after JHipster 6.0, it has only bug fixes.

Github has the 64 closed tickets and merged pull requests for this release.

JHipster 6.1: Angular 8

JHipster released version 6.1 on June 11, 2019, a month after the 6.0.1 bug fix release described above. Apart from bug fixes and minor feature updates, the headline feature of this release is the switch from Angular 7 to Angular 8. Why is Angular 8 such a big deal?

Angular has a compiler which takes your Typescript code and the HTML templates and turns them into Javascript code for your browser to run. The Angular team is changing two core pieces here — the build system around the compiler and the compiler itself. Angular 8 has previews of these changes, while Angular 9 (November?) will hopefully see them finished:

• Bazel replaces the current build system and reduces build time through incremental builds and tests.
• Ivy is the new compiler which will eventually produce faster and much smaller Javascript files, speeding up Angular applications significantly.

Since JHipster defines the Angular build system, JHipster also needs to switch to Bazel. So we can leave Bazel alone for now. However, you may opt-in to Ivy. I wouldn’t recommend that since Ivy, by Google’s own measurements, doesn’t produce smaller JavaScript files, yet.

Github has the 182 closed tickets and merged pull requests for this release.