JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Choosing which pattern will create and run a widget in an application has become a rather complicated enterprise. Picking the “right one” is almost always a subjective decision.

Some widget vendors offer just a single approach, while others offer multiple ways to get the job done. Which should you use? I won’t presume to know which is best for you and will dispense with the notion of writing an article prescribing the ideal pattern to adopt. “Ideal,” in this context, is almost always relative to talent, time, and trade-offs. I like to call these the three t’s of development decision making.

What I intend to offer in this article is more of an overview, not a recommendation. I merely want to showcase some of the common patterns used by widget vendors so that the unaware developer can familiarize themselves with the options.

If you’re developing web sites or web applications today, there’s a good chance you have data to communicate, and that data may be begging for a good visualization. But how do you know what kind of visualization is appropriate? And, even more importantly, how do you actually create one? Answers to those very questions are the core of this book. In the chapters that follow, we explore dozens of different visualizations and visualization techniques and tool kits. Each example discusses the appropriateness of the visualization (and suggests possible alternatives) and provides step-by-step instructions for including the visualization in your own web pages.

Contents:

1. Introduction
   1. Implementation vs Design
   2. Code vs. Styling
   3. Simple vs. Complex
   4. Reality vs. an Ideal World
   5. Source Code for Examples
   6. Acknowledgements
2. Graphing Data
3. Making Charts Interactive
4. Integrating Charts in a Page
5. Creating Specialized Graphs
6. Showing Timelines
7. Visualizing Geographic Data
8. Custom Visualizations with D3.js
9. Building Data-Driven Web Applications
10. Managing Data in the Browser

Fortunately, it turns out to be very easy to use jquery plugins inside of React classes so I just used typeahead.js as is. For the StructureMap diagnostics, I wanted a search bar that allowed users to search for all the assemblies, namespaces, and types configured in the main application container with typeahead recommendations. Since I was going to want to reuse that search bar on a couple different little screens, I did things the idiomatic way React wants to be used anyway and created the small component shown below...

jQuery is a fast, small and feature-rich JavaScript library. It makes manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much easier with an easy API. Let's see how well it works with Ember.js

This article explains how to efficiently, and effectively, bind events using jQuery.

If you've used jQuery much at all, then you're probably already familiar with event binding. It's fairly basic stuff, but dig a little deeper and you'll find opportunities to make your event-driven code less brittle and more manageable.

This article examines some of the "magic tricks" performed by modern frameworks. The author then pulls back the curtain to show how the magic works.

• Creating DOM Elements From a String
• Revealing AngularJS Dependency Injection
• Adopting Ember’s Computed Properties
• The Crazy React Templates
• Summary