I attended the St. Louis Angular Lunch for the first time yesterday.

It's hosted out at the West edge of St. Louis at Oasis Digital. A lot the people there were with Oasis Digital which does Angular trainings and certainly all four of the panelists shown here, from left to right Christina Hardin, Cory Rylan, Paul Spears, and Lance Finney, work at and train for Oasis Digital. These four had recently attended ng-conf which is an annually reoccurring Angular conference and they spoke of their thoughts. A majority of persons in the room had attended the conference too and so others piped up as well. The conversation wandered a little beyond that too detailing that ngxs is a new rival to NgRx (annotations instead of pure functions) for example, but predominately allowed me once again vicariously experience a conference as I had here and here. I enjoyed the St. Louis Angular Lunch.

StackBlitz, an online IDE kinda like Plunker but better, was the star of ng-conf. Eric Simons and Albert Pai are the inventors. StackBlitz allows you to draw in dependencies a lot quicker than the typical doctor-ups of package.json followed by npm install approach as the dependencies are all there online in its own machinery already. You may publish out a package.json when you are ready. When you run an application you will have a URL that you may just share out to let others play with the instance of the app. Supposedly, at the conference a speaker was doing some live coding of a PDA (personal digital assistant) and invited the audience to pull up the app on their phones. What is more eventually there was some sort of raffle across all of the connections connected to the app and a winner got an alert at his phone and put his hand up in the crowd to claim some sort of prize. Schematics was mentioned as a code generation tool. Apparently, it will make all of the NgRx store machinery too for a collection such as a reducer file. A rival to this approach lies in ngrx-data which John Papa and Ward Bell presented on. It is built on top of "NgRx entities" which offer some capabilities to work with collections coming from Observables a little better. Taking it a step farther with ngrx-data you may sort collections and find the item at position X and a lot of the LINQ and Lambda stuff of C# basically. How does that rival Schematics? I guess the acrobatics you might undertake in some of the generated files for, I dunno, sorting perhaps might just be undertaken inline in manhandling an Observable. Angular Elements allow for the packaging up of reusable elements and even Angular itself is now down below 1K in size so it may just be packaged up as a part of an element and that element may be used in other web sites that are not even Angular sites. The ability to destroy a component has been removed from the Angular CLI. ng-packagr is a third party tool for drawing in libraries and now the Angular CLI works well with third party tools and allows you to make calls to them so there was a lot discussed on pulling in third party libraries with the Angular CLI. ng add and ng update are newish things in the CLI. Sam Julien of Portland, Oregon has a series of videos online on how to migrate from AngularJS to Angular.