Angular exploded onto the scene because of the simple fact that it's built by Google (it is open source). Angular is basically like putting HTML on steroids. The applications and pages that you create use regular HTML that we're all used to, but they include a number of new and custom directives that extend the core functionality of HTML, giving it awesome new power.

Another great feature of Angular, which has seasoned non-web developers flocking to it is that it is built from the group to be heavily tested and supports dependency injection. It's a framework that doesn't make creating sophisticated web applications feel like traditional web development.

Make no mistake, however; JavaScript still plays a huge role in the development of Angular. The new Angular 2.0, which is now 4.0, is already one of the most extensively used frameworks of today. It has not only introduced TypeScript for syntactical modularity of code, but also provides new semantics, such as components (instead of controllers), pipes, life cycle hooks, and more features. Let's learn more about Angular by implementing a simple client application that consumes the phone-API created in the previous chapter.

Unlike Angular.js, Angular 2.0 is a whole framework, rather than a single includable file. This framework comes with a bunch of features, such as rxJs, TypeScript, systemJs, and so on, which provide an integrated development of code. The Angular team has provided simple steps to set up Angular 2.0 seed application. However, a developer can also create a manual list of the minimal files required for Angular projects, though it is not recommended and is also time consuming. For our client prototype, we will follow the Angular quick-start steps provided by angular.io and then integrate our functionality in to it. Let's follow these steps.