@woppa684 thanks for the detailed explanation.

The preferred option for angular distribution going forward is going to be NPM. there's a few reasons for this, primarily that its used by the vast majority of the JS ecosystem already. That said, you could certainly do what you're doing (gross, though, for real... ;-)

Your actual question though is about typings, and that's a more complex thing. Typescript 1.6 introduced a new way of handling typings, and this is what we're working with. Rather than the "ambient" style modules, which look like:

declare module {}

typescript .d.ts files now mirror their source files - they're effectively ES6 version of d.ts files: (this is a snip from the http module:

import { RequestOptionsArgs, ConnectionBackend } from './interfaces';
import { Request } from './static_request';
import { RequestOptions } from './base_request_options';

export declare class Http {
    protected _backend: ConnectionBackend;
    protected _defaultOptions: RequestOptions;
    constructor(_backend: ConnectionBackend, _defaultOptions: RequestOptions);
    request(url: string | Request, options?: RequestOptionsArgs): any;
}

The first (incredibly great thing) this enables is developers to not have to mess with tsd or ///ref references. A developer starting with angular2 just does:

tsc -init --experimentalDecorators
npm install angular2
and then they can simply:

import {Component} from 'angular2/angular2'

and everything pretty much works. This works because typescript's new module resolution algorithm works the same as NodeJS's, and so the NPM distribution looks like:

- angular2.js
- angular2.d.ts
-- src/foo.js
-- src/foo.d.ts

This algorithm currently assumes that your vendor code is in a node_modules folder, and so if you start shifting things around, resolution will probably fail. The TS is aware of this (JS users who prefer JSPM have the same issue) - and this issue microsoft/TypeScript#5039 is tracking progress on that - that would allow you to reconfigure the mapping as you pleased.

Now - the biggest change here is that instead of a monolithic single angular2.d.ts file, there's one d.ts file per source file - this, again, mirrors the direction of modern javascript. The ecosystem is moving away from shipping monolithic bundled blobs of code, towards distributing proper, modular code - this is something that is very much normal in modern webdev today, and it is likely to be the way of the future.

This changes the build strategy you mentioned (that is, compile everything in foo/* ) into a much more intelligent way of building. If I had a main file like

//main.ts
import {bootstrap} from 'angular2/angular2' //npm
import {SomeOtherDep} from 'my/awesome/dep' //npm
import {MyComponent} from './components/MyComponent' //local 

bootstrap(MyComponent);

Rather than saying "concat and minify all the stuff in vendor, and then concat all the stuff in ./ " - you simply say "build my application starting at main.ts" - and because the import/export syntax is understood by tooling, tools can trace the dependency tree and pull in only the referenced code to produce the final bundle - which is far more efficient (eg: if you use angular2, but not our http module, you dont need that code)

The two leaders in this bit of tooling are currently Webpack and JSPM, but TypeScript has bundling on their roadmap to accomplish the same goal.

Now - we will continue to distribute bundled JS code - but is not certainly not the preferred method for consuming angular2. As of now, there isn't a great solution for us re-bundling the d.ts files generated by TypeScript - previous to alpha 42, we had a pretty hacky manual process that caused us a lot of trouble to keep stable and up to date. There are some third party tools for that beginning to show up.

The Angular2 bundles that exist today are primarily for ES5 users, and for making plunkers and demos easier to get online, but they are not the recommended solution for (eventual!) production usage. I would strongly suggest moving towards the modern way of working with Javascript modules. I realize that's easy for me to say and less so for you to flip the switch on, but as Angular2 is trying to be forward-looking, it is where we will concentrate our efforts.

Hope that explains more that it confuses - we definitely want to enable a variety of use cases here, so happy to continue discussing if you have more questions.

(ps - use NPM. you'll love it.)

Typings files in alpha.46 #5248

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thelgevoldopenedon Nov 12, 2015

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thelgevold
openedon Nov 12, 2015