JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

This article shows how you can use client side JavaScript libraries like AngularJS and KnockoutJS to build SharePoint 2013 WebParts.

In this article, we will learn how to make use of JavaScript libraries to fetch data from SharePoint List and bind that data to some controls using SharePoint Web parts. For this demonstration, we will make use of AngularJS and KnockoutJS JavaScript libraries.

Using these libraries in SharePoint development can make a big difference as we will see shortly. We will use these libraries with SharePoint Web parts using our very favorite tool – Microsoft Visual Studio. I am using Visual Studio 2013 for these demonstrations.

As seen at http://www.shareconf.de/

What is a Single Page Application?  Essentially, an application disguised as a single web page.  Like the official "Twitter" web application.  You click, things happen, data is loaded and released asynchronously, layouts are arranged and displayed.  Like magic.

On a crazy Thursday afternoon I had the mad idea of building a Single Page Application on top of SharePoint.

The story so far
* Everything in a SharePoint farm solution
* UI layout using Twitter Bootstrap - what you see above is based on the Fluid example template
* UI binding using Knockout.JS
* Additional glue with jQuery
* Reading from SharePoint via OOTB REST service API
* Exposes _spPageContextInfo object
* Expose SP.ClientContext objects/scripts