A common question when looking at AngularJS for the first time is about how to combine it with existing JavaScript code and components. For jQuery UI in particular, the team around AngularJS has created the AngularUI project (http://angular-ui.github.com/) which provides an easy way to use jQuery UI with Angular.). For other frameworks - or especially for your custom DOM-manipulating code - the necessary steps might not be as obvious at the first glance.
Most existing components (especially in the jQuery-world) usually work in a different way. Without Angular, when you wanted to achieve a certain behavior, like displaying a date-picker, you would usually go with a jQuery UI extension (like 'datepicker') and use call similar to $("#someinput").datepicker({...}). This would extend a standard <input> element with an ID of someinput to be turned into a datepicker.
In this command's options, you would have usually specified a callback to be invoked whenever the user selects/changes the date in the input box. But you wouldn't do this just for a single datepicker -- no, this kind of jQuery UI-extension would be littered throughout your business code for nearly every input control in your HTML. After all, your datepickers need access to the underlying model values to restrict the input to valid ranges and to perform additional validation if necessary. This mix of business code and DOM-manipulating code is sometimes the reason for maintenance headaches of JavaScript developers.
With this in mind, you can see the conundrum: how do you take classic JavaScript code (with this mix of DOM interactions and event handlers with direct manipulation of underlying business objects) and put it into the well defined structure of AngularJS?
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