With all of the new features Angular 2 takes advantage of, like static typing, decorators and ES6 module resolution, comes the added cost of setup and maintenance. Spending a lot of time with different build setups and configuring all of the different tools used to serve a modern JavaScript application can really take a lot of time and drain productivity by not being able to actually work on the app itself.
Seeing the popularity of ember-cli, Angular 2 decided they would provide their own CLI to solve this problem. Angular CLI is geared to be the tool used to create and manage your Angular 2 app. It provides the ability to:
- create a project from scratch
- scaffold components, directives, services, etc.
- lint your code
- serve the application
- run your unit tests and end to end tests.
The Angular 2 CLI currently only generates scaffolding in TypeScript, with other dialects to come later.