Protractor VS Angular

Cypress is a next-generation front-end Automation testing tool built for modern web applications. It is a JavaScript-based end-to-end testing framework and is known for faster test execution as compared with other testing tools (like Selenium or Protractor).

Protractor repo (link)

Protractor has been deprecated for a while on the Angular CLI side and given Nx has had Cypress support for a while it has never been a popular choice. Starting with this release we're deprecating the generator for setting up Protractor and we're planning on removing support entirely in Nx v15.

In recent releases, the Angular CLI kept reducing its feature set, mainly due to tools such as Protractor as well as TSLint being deprecated. As a result, starting with Angular 14, the Angular CLI provides the following when generating a new application:

The Protractor testing framework was created for e2e testing of Angular apps. https://www.protractortest.org/

Future of Angular E2E & Plans for Protractor · Issue #5502 · angular/protractor

In April, the Angular team has announced plans to end the support of Protractor at the end of 2022.

"The Angular team plans to end development of Protractor at the end of 2022 (in conjunction with Angular v15)." - https://github.com/angular/protractor/issues/5502

Angular will deprecate Protractor soon https://github.com/angular/protractor/issues/5502

source: https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/46542

Besides the dangers, mentioned by Angular docs (infinite loops, change detection errors), there is another thing, that might be quite nasty: effects are executed in a reactive context, and any code you call in effect, will be executed in a reactive context. If that code reads some signals, they will be added as dependencies to your effect. Here Alex Rickabaugh explains the details.

In June 2023, the Angular team raised a new RFC to implement control flow syntaxes within Angular. They gave the following rationale for introducing control flow syntax:

For scheduling, I use awesome code I found in the Angular source code.

Just to give you more context, I led the migration of several AngularJS applications to the newer Angular Framework. My client finally decided to make that move following the AngularJS deprecation announcement (stay up to date please 🙏)️.

Link — angular/CONTRIBUTING.md

Angular v17 was released some months ago with a ton of new features, a brand new logo and the new blog angular.dev.

The Angular renaissance is still ongoing. MiniRx is part of that renaissance and released a new Signal-based state management library for Angular: MiniRx Signal Store.

https://github.com/angular/angular/commit/3faf3e23d55b3e41cc43c4498393b01440f1cbb7 If you check the code behind these instructions, one can see they enhance the functionality of existing, listener, and property template instructions, with writable signal handling capabilities.