These are the concepts making up the core of your application. They will be there for every project:
- Node Package Manager (npm)
- SystemJS
- TypeScript setup and TypeScript definition files
- Linting
Let's discuss these concepts to give an introduction to the set up.
All web projects will need a starter web page.
Node.js is JavaScript on the server side. In the context of an Angular build, Node.js is used to pull in a lot of libraries (from npm) to help with tasks such as bundling, testing, and minification. It is essential to have at least a decent grasp on how to work with Node.js and its echo system. A more detailed description of this follows in a following subsection.
As for SystemJS, it is a module bundler. Projects in JavaScript aren't written in just one file any more; sometimes, they're written in 1,000s of files. How these files relate to one another is by using a module system, and SystemJS is one of many module bundlers out there. The Angular team has chosen TypeScript as the lingua franca for writing Angular apps, which means we need to set up TypeScript properly in terms of compiling it and make sure TypeScript knows how to consume dependent libraries written in ES5.
Lastly, linting is about ensuring we follow best practices when it comes to writing our code, both for consistency and to avoid bugs.
Now, let's dive into these concepts in detail.