E029 - State Management Pt 1 - The History & Angular Data

Buckle your seatbelt folks, this is going to be one heck of a ride. Get ready for episode one of a six-part series on State Management in Angular. That's right, there was no way we could fit the topic into a single episode.

Panelists Aaron Frost, Brian Love, and Jennifer Wadella start with defining what exactly is "state" in a client application and why it matters. We then jump into a time machine and travel back to the (good?) ole' days of state management in AngularJS. Remember $scope? What about those long digest cycles? But, have no fear, we'll then race forward in time to the pending release of the modern-framework that is Angular (version 2+).

The panelists then welcome Googler Alex Rickabaugh to share how he made his way onto the Angular Team through an internal data fetching/caching project called Streamy. His experience with building Streamy led to working on a PoC Angular project, "Tactical", in an attempt to provide Angular with a State Management+ solution. Tactical aimed to manage data flow, offline, validation, caching, conflicts, and more. While Tactical was never released as an official part of the Angular platform, Alex shares insight into the complexities of state management and building abstract tools to solve the oft-encountered programming problem.

But wait, wait... there's more. The panelists then scrub forward in time to hearing about state management evolutions in other frameworks, such as Flux and then Redux. Then, zooming forward even more into the land of Promises and then the revelation (and struggle) of Observables. With all that history and information, you definitely don't want to miss this episode! Come join us on the journey, and definitely don't forget to subscribe to stay caught up on all our future episodes as well!

Alex Rickabaugh: @synalx

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