When I started learning AngualJs I have couple of questions in my mind like who is the creator AngularJs? When it started? Why its named Angular? etc etc.
Long back I read one quote
The best things in life are not planned, they simply just happen;
That’s exactly what happened with Angularjs. There is an interesting story behind the birth of Angularjs.
The History of AngularJs
It all started in 2008 and 2009, Misko hevery (a developer at Google) working on a part time project to simplify web application development. Not for web developers but web designers who have no or little knowledge about web development by extending vocabulary of HTML, so that if we have a static web server you can actually build a simple web application (without worrying about what is happening in the back ground).
Misko Hevery
Adam Abrons
Adam abrons friend of Misko, who is working with him on this project named it as Angular as its HTML and HTML contains angular brackets.
So they register is domain called getangular.com (as angular.com is already taken).
Misko Hevery and Adam Aborns are inventors of AngularJs.
I have gone through way back machine took a snapshot of getangular.com. This is how its look like.
Get Angular
He had hard time to explain what actually it is, so Misko told people that it’s a kind of Spread sheet in cloud so that we can bind data and save it without worrying about security persistent etc and UI will be in HTML.
At that point of time Brad Green manager of Misko at Google asked him to work on one of the Google internal tool called Google Feedback Tool.
Google has a framework called Google web tool kit (GWT) written in Java to develop their internal tools and projects.
Three developers including _Misko_ wrote 17000 lines of code for 6 months, later it’s became very difficult for them to write code as it’s hard to test.
To add one label in HTML you have write code in java and compile it and transform it to HTML JavaScript to display in web browser.
Then Misko challenged Brad that he can write whole thing in 2 weeks by using his side project Angular.
He lost the challenge but completed it in 3 weeks of time. And the lines of code reduced 1500 within 3 weeks with angular (one developer).
Impressed Brad Green asked him to work further on angular. Then he along with Shyam Seshadri and Igor Minor shipped Google feedback tool with complete AngularJs.
Brad Green
Then they went for review with Urs hoelzle,Senior engineering manager at Google(part of Google infrastructure team at that time).
Then he said “You guys are all liars, Yes you had a great success on one small project small for Google scale,until you do something at large scale you really don’t know what you are talking about ”
According to Brad Green this is a great quote about Angular.
Yes they don’t know the power of AngularJs yet. They left with an option to Give up.
Then what they did at that time is lead to the birth of powerful JavaScript framework angula js And every developer programmer should remember this.
In Brad Green words If we have a job, probably we do what best for our job to pay our bills, and at that time they could have just given up,but they have a practice called Constructive disobedience
Give up or Practice Constructive Disobedience.
Then they open sourced it and people outside of Google started using it.
Later Google acquired DoubleClick Company. Double Click built on C#,Asp .Net platform.
Marc Jacobs tech lead of DoubleClick Digital Marketing Manager team and his team started writing it from scratch as they don’t have much dotnet developers at that time.
His team consist of few C# developers and JavaScript developers and they do not have much idea about Google web toolkit (GWT).
They started exploring other technology options and inspired by one of the tech talk of Miskov about AngularJs, They built small prototypes using GWT and AngularJs.
They took one of the landing page of Doubleclick and by using same webservices and CSS, One developer able to complete it in two days and it was 1⁄10 size and about 10x faster.
Whereas with Google Web Toolkit they worked for two and half weeks and could not complete it and gave up.
Finally, they decided to go with Angular. It’s again the Constructive Disobedience of Marc Jacobs.
Everyone at Google using GWT and this person decided go for AngularJs. Initially they faced few problems but at the end its happy story.
With the success of DoubleClick other teams also started using it. Finally the decided to give it an identity instead of old GetAngular.
They run a contest for t-shirts and logo in 99designs
T-shirt : https://99designs.com/t-shirt-design/contests/angularjs-needs-t-shirt-design-82636/entries
Logo : https://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/create-logo-google-angularjs-framework-127104
_Misko hevery _decided to go for shield like logo because it’s similar to HTML5 logo, it shields from low levels of browsers and it’s kind of cool super hero thing.
Angular js Logo
Brad Green decided to release stable API 1.0 version of AngularJs (backed by Google) so that people can rely on it by August 2010.
It got delayed and they officially released AngularJs v1.0 in May 2011.
In the journey of AngularJs it lost Database and became powerful front end JavaScript framework (which is original idea of Misko to develop end to end project to help web developer)
References : Keynote Ng-conf-2014 and DoubleClick with AngularJs
