JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Before you know it your site is growing in complexity and your JavaScript files are quickly becoming extremely hard to manage, let alone make performant.

Thankfully these days we have a handful of tools to help with this situation. Let’s examine RequireJS in an attempt to decide if it’s for you… or not.

In this TypeScript RequireJS tutorial I will show you how to setup AMD classes, setup your config file and how to use RequireJS plugins with TypeScript.

Unlike some other SPA frameworks, Kendo's SPA implementation doesn't do much to dictate your code layout. In this article we will see one way to lay out your SPA application using Require.js and the kendo-template Require.js plugin.

Require.js is one of my favorite ways to work with large JavaScript applications. It allows you to build AMD (asynchronous module definition) style modules to break up your application into small reusable modules. This is a desirable feature in large code bases.

It's important to know when and why you may consider require.js. If you're working on a small application that doesn't have a need for many files and little logic, you may or may not need the overhead of require.js. However, you still can get value out of it's organization and structure it provides you.

In most of the example applications that I've seen, all application script files are loaded upfront i.e. all JavaScript files are loaded when the user accesses application. I get annoyed by this approach; why should all the components be loaded upfront when the probability of user accessing the entire application is very less. How does one architect a multi-page application using Angular? What would be the size of the application after minifying all the JavaScript files. Most importantly how does one load the components lazily. I've used RequireJS in my previous projects and it allows you to load components on demand; the idea is to load components based on the selected route. I've tried a similar approach with Angular using 'resolve' property in the $routeProvider.

This article introduces the Browserify tool. It also shows how Browserify can be integrated with Grunt and Gulp.

any of us now work with JavaScript modules – independently functioning components that come together to work as a cohesive whole, yet can happily have any component replaced without causing armageddon. Many of us have been using the AMD module pattern and RequireJS to accomplish this neatly.

Everyone wants to write modular code, but it's not always easy. In the world of front end web development things like stylesheets, markup, and assets are some of the most easily identifiable obstacles to writing truly modular code. Add to that monolithic libraries like jQuery, Angular, etc. and it can be tempting to throw your hands up and simply dump all the code for an application into a single place.

Atomify makes overcoming these obstacles easy, and this post will begin to show you how.

So what, exactly, does it do?

• Enables you to build properly atomic front end components
• Brings a dependency graph to your CSS, removing the need for impossibly long and disorganized stylesheets
• Unifies the bundling of your code, templates and styles into one easily configurable tool
• Makes full modularity the default, instead of a complicated pipe dream

Recently I had the opportunity to use Browserify as one of the tools for creating a JavaScript module for a client that is building a mapping product for architects and urban planners.

In that project I used Browserify and npm scripts to bundle the module into a file the client could use as a standalone library that could be added to any web page that needed to use the tool.

It was a fairly straightforward and flexible build process, and here I'll outline a similar structure that you could use in your projects.

Our example project will be named Pizza, because our example library will do nothing but return the string 'Pizza'. Deal with it.

In recent months, I have been sharing different versions of the Employee Directory sample application built with different technology stacks, different frameworks, and different back-end (REST services) implementations. Recent versions include:

A number of you have asked for a version of the application built with AngularJS. So here it is.

You can experience the application below...

The Javascript world is dominated by frameworks, and it is because of our reluctance to having dependencies in our libraries. If you are going to write a Javascript library, you have two options:

1. Depend on a proven framework.
2. Depend on no one.

If you choose option #1, you contribute to the worship of the framework.

If you choose option #2, you are faced with a problem. If you make it too small, it may not be useful enough to warrant a download (are you download-worthy?). What happens sometimes is a set of smaller functionalities get packaged up into a larger library to give users more value for the download. Another thing that tends to happen is established libraries get bigger over time as new techniques are discovered and new features invented, because this makes it easier for existing users.

As someone who likes to write small libraries, the dream for me, is this: I want easy dependencies: regardless of how many dependencies and/or nested dependencies my project has, I want to be able tell people "using my library is as easy as 1-2-3."

What I want is something like NPM.