Rest in Peace, Express.
For years, Angular Universal relied on a slow, synchronous Express.js wrapper. It was hard to configure and impossible to deploy to Cloudflare Workers or Vercel Edge.
Angular SSR 2.0 (inspired by AnalogJS) uses the Nitro engine—the same powerhouse behind Nuxt.
02. Attributes of the New Engine
🚀 Zero-Config
No more server.ts maintenance. Nitro auto-detects API routes and server middleware.
🌍 Platform Agnostic
Build once. Deploy to Node, Deno, Bun, Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare.
💾 Cache API
Built-in KV storage and response caching. defineCachedEventHandler.
03. Deploying to the Edge
Because Nitro removes the Node.js dependency, your Angular app can now run closer to the user.
"build": {'{'}
"builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:application",
"options": {'{'}
"server": "src/main.server.ts",
"prerender": true
{'}'}
{'}'}
{'}'}
Deep Dive: Edge Caching (SWR)
The killer feature is SWR (Stale-While-Revalidate).
Nitro can serve a "stale" (cached) version of your SSR page instantly (10ms) while simultaneously fetching fresh data in the background to update the cache for the next user. Speed + Freshness.
04. The Senior Engineer's Take
Why Next.js still wins (for now)
Angular's new SSR is fantastic, but it lacks the granular React Server Components (RSC) model where components can fetch their own data asynchronously on the server and stream in.
Angular still fetches data in a route resolver or service. Watch this space—Signals + SSR Streaming is the next frontier.