Angular Connect is Europe’s largest angular conference. This year, the two-day conference was hosted in London where more than 40 world-renowned Angular experts shared their experience with Angular and their new developments and implementation strategies. One of the 40 Angular developers was Jochen Supper, Head of Development at the Allianz GDF. Many of the teams in Allianz run on angular and build their angular material on CDK (Component Dev Kit) which is why it became a very important platform for Allianz.
The developers at the Global Digital Factory are continuously trying to improve the development process of web and digital applications throughout Allianz and its OEs. As part of the opening keynote session by Google’s Angular team, Jochen introduced some use-cases and learnings from providing a global Allianz UI component library for two years.
The two major improvements the GDF has worked on over the last months are summarized here:
1. Schematics
The objective of schematics has been to reduce the impact of breaking changes on our users. Therefore, we have built ng updates and ng update commands which makes the life of the team members easier. We have learnt through this development that we cannot assume, that every team implements it straight away but has to be reminded of its positive impact on their work flow. What we can say though, is that every team that has implemented these automation updates, has loved it.
2. Different use cases / Beyond theming
We have two use cases we serve within Allianz, both having different needs concerning applications. We have the B2C market on the one side, where customers are happy to have an animation like a floating label, within their digital application. On the other side we have our own employees who prefer working with a simple and rigid application.
To get from the one to the other, some markup is involved. It’s not only theming but you have to change the markup of the component when you use it. As a result, we had a lot of conventions and when building internal applications, people basically had to follow a lot of conventions and different components. We thought its working fine but we realized people don’t read documentation all day so they don’t know those conventions by heart.
What we came up with, are injection tokens. They have presets that are conventions and code, which are packaged and shipped to them with our internal NDBX library. So any team that builds applications for internal users, can just drop the module into the application and it changes the application automatically to the internally preferred version. You can overwrite this to keep the flexibility. In case any convention changes, anew package gets shipped which updates the old convention. Therefore, it is up and running in no time.
To sum it up, in the last few months, the GDF development team was heavily working on moving things from manual or conventions into code. Additionally, a lot conventions were moved into injection tokens so that people can just drop them in and use them as they go.
Also, stay tuned for our upcoming eMerge Summit for more insights into new software development updates within the GDF, Allianz Technology and our OEs.
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