JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

In the previous posts (1, 2, 3) I covered creating an Ember.js-based single page application, then wiring it up to Windows Azure Mobile Services for data storage. But currently it allows everyone to post anonymously. I at least want some basic authentication so I can verify the user is a real person and maybe hold them accountable for things they post.

Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it trivially easy to set up authentication using Facebook, Google, Microsoft account (formerly LiveID), or Twitter as the authentication provider.

Last week I created a new single page application using Ember.js as the client framework (see Part 1 and Part 2). Today, I finish up the application by adding Windows Azure Mobile Services for data storage.

Mobile Services is a preview feature of Windows Azure, so you may need to enable the preview for your account. Once you've done this, perform the following steps to create a new service and get the HTML and JavaScript code to add a client to the application.

Over the next few blog posts I'll go through the process of creating a single page blogging application using Ember.js that uses Windows Azure Mobile Services for data storage, and then deploy it to a Windows Azure Web Site.

Single page applications normally have an .html page that acts as a container for the JavaScript that is the brains of the application. This JavaScript is responsible for generating the information displayed in the browser based on templates, and handles routing you between 'pages' (really just loading different templates) and communicating with data sources such as a remote REST API to retrieve data used by the templates.

Ember.js provides an model-view-controller (MVC) approach to designing a single page application, where the model and controller are implemented in JavaScript and the view is implemented in Handlebars, a templating language.

Last week I created a new single page application using Ember.js as the client framework (see Part 1 and Part 2). Today, I finish up the application by adding Windows Azure Mobile Services for data storage.

Mobile Services is a preview feature of Windows Azure.

To wire Mobile services to Ember, I used ember-model. Why? It provides a basic framework with the assumption that you will bring your own data access; you just implement the create/save/etc. functions that are already stubbed out.

Today I continue building the application started in Part 1 by adding navigation and some basic routes and templates.

At this point, the application has a few static pages, a controller to handle submission of new forms, but that's about it. In the next post I'll wire up Windows Azure Mobile Services to store blog posts, change the posts.hbs to display a list of posts, and add a route and template to handle displaying individual posts.