JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Developing a complex and dynamic data-driven web application can be a challenging task. Keeping a user interface in sync with the underlying data normally involves wiring up a number of event handlers to broker information between the various elements and the data whenever any actions are performed by a user or when new data is loaded.

In Umbraco 7, we've setup routing conventions in AngularJs, pretty much the same way as asp.net mvc has them defined. This gives us a lot of advantages, and a flexible routing system that doesn't need any additional entries as our application grows.

So out of the box, AngularJs comes with a routing configuration, where you've been able to return different view paths and map these to certain Url patterns.

This is basic Angular routing, but one of the new things in 1.1.x branch (current 'unstable' version) is that you can return thetemplateUrl as a function instead of a string, so you can do more dynamic things like so:...

Coding was once considered to be a nerdy pursuit. But in truth, learning to code not only opens a wide range of lucrative career paths, it is excellent for logic and problem solving skills. In fact, the new national curriculum for England now requires children as young as five learn to write and develop computer programs.

Many kids already have an innate aptitude for coding, but haven't had an opportunity to do so. Here are some websites to get your child going. They're either free or are free to try.

This is the first in a series of articles on Building Realtime HTML5 Apps. I recently created a new framework called bone.io, and I wanted to share my thoughts and ideas on building realtime web applications.

This series is going to be less of a how-to guide, and more of a 30,000 foot view of the realtime web and the potential for the next generation of web applications.

Steven Sanderson explains how to write abstract and testable application logic without any DOM clutter with Knockout.js and how Knockout automatically updates app’s UI whenever needed.

In ECMAScript 5, functions do triple duty:

• As normal functions: you can directly call functions.
• As methods: you can assign a function to the property of an object and call it as a method, via that object.
• As constructors: you can invoke functions as constructors, via the newoperator.

The three main problems with this approach are:

1. It confuses people.
2. You can use a function the wrong way, e.g. call a constructor or a method as a normal function.
3. Functions used as normal functions shadow the this of surrounding constructors or methods [1]. That’s because this is always dynamic (provided by each function call), but should be lexical in this case, like normal variables that are resolved via surrounding scopes if they are not declared within a function.

Let’s first look at ECMAScript 6’s callable entities and then at how they help with these problems.

We can build amazing SPA and HTML5 applications when choosing a powerful framework like Angular, Durandal, Ember, or Backbone. And while I love my personal favorites Angular and Durandal, it’s not all magic. There is a learning curve and some things are really important to decide up front. Once you choose your framework, you should decide how you will organize the structure of your project.

In this post I’ll show how I organize my Angular based projects and discuss why I like it.

You know the case when you hit submit button quickly enough that it sends the form twice? Or when you hit submit button and it seems that nothing happens, so you click it once again and another request is being fired? Duplicated requests issue - you can experience it in both traditional web application as well as in modern so-called Single Page Applications. I’d like to show you how it can be handled in AngularJS and how we did it in Codebrag.

The past few days, I’ve been experimenting with angularjs. It’s an awesome javascript MVC framework and I recommend checking it out if you haven’t!
One of its features are directives which, among other things, allow you to replace html elements with a specific tag name or attribute name with a template and adjust their behaviour. This is nice if you have complex HTML structures in a website which repeat themselves.
Another awesome thing I’ve already posted about is twitter bootstrap, so I thought I would make some angularjs directives for bootstrap harder that I have difficulty remembering.

A Deferred object is a mechanism for referencing a value which may (or may not) be available at a later point.

Every so often you might require a group of operations to complete before you continue. These operations might need to happen either in sequence or in any order, but they all have to finish before the code can continue.

Ajax requests are the best examples of Deferred Objects because they're so commonly used. But some other cases for Deferred Objects include file access, web workers or other asynchronous calls.

An interesting use I've toyed with is user interaction. Embedded below is an example that shows how to combine deferred objects with mouse events to create a simple mouse dexterity game.

Often in complex ember apps you want to use debouncing and throttling, to avoid doing expensive processing or too many server requests. I had hacked together a solution for this with underscore, but then I found out that Ember.js includes built in throttle and debounce functions. A few minutes later, I came up with these handy little helpers: