JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

As an Angular.js developer, I want to test my code, so that I can feel reasonably good about it. This sounds like a "User Story" in Scrum but it's more of a developer quest. So in this blog we will look at ways to test our Angular.js code.

Let's see what we need -

We need to write unit tests for our

* Controllers

* Services

* Directives

* Filters

We need to write end-to-end tests so that we can be sure everything is working well together

If there is one feature compared to other JS framework that make AngularJS better, it is the ability to implement tests. This is normal I would say since the framework was developed by integrating this fundamental aspect at the beginning.

But AngularJS is not magic either, as anyone who has implemented tests know, it is important to think its code for testing. You have to be careful not using objects or methods without knowing whether they will be easily testable. For example, a controller, if in one of the calls are made there is DOM access via jQuery for example, this code immediately become complex to test.
Unfortunately, current tools do not allow us to make TDD as easily than with Java, when I writing a test the IDE will propose the creation of classes and methods. However, nothing prevents it.

As developers we often need to create widgets for interfaces that make it easier to accomplish certain tasks. These might be sliders for controlling video playback, calendar pickers for selecting dates or any other number of other useful widgets. The problem that we face when creating these widgets is how to manageencapsulation.

The widgets that we write are often reused on a number of other pages, but how do we make sure that none of the code on those pages will interfere with code used to build the widget itself. This problem of creating a boundary between the widgtet code you wrote and the code that will consume your widget is something that Web Components aims to solve.

Some folks on our team have been working on making node.js work awesomely on Windows. There's a few questions you might have.

Tomasz Janczuk is working on the iisnode project lately. You might think that Windows and node don't belong together. "That's just wrong! What are they thinking? I thought IIS was all about .NET?" Well, you may recall I spoke at CodeMash a few years back on IIS7 and PHP and did a screencast showing how IIS7, PHP and FastCGI could push many thousands of requests a second. The IIS folks, the Windows folks, the Azure folks, want to make sure everything runs well on Windows. Remember, we sell Windows, so it's good if it does many things well. ;)

I’ve been working with ASP and ASP.NET for about ten years now, starting with ASP classic and settling on .NET 2.0 as my favorite. My new year resolution this year (2013) was to upgrade my .NET work to .NET 4.0 using Visual Studio 2012 Express and really get to grips with MSBuild, so that I can concatenate and minify my JavaScript files as part of the normal build process of a .NET project, in Visual Studio.

I wanted a non-trivial project to demonstrate this process, because I find the devil is in the details. I have often faithfully followed an overly-simple tutorial or introduction to an unfamiliar subject, then discovered that the tutorial did not prepare me for when you want to do something even slightly difficult. So, in this tutorial we’ll be attempting to marry Knockout.js and jQuery UI. We will also be using a JSON file with a hierarchy of data to define a menu.

Let’s look at a simple ecommerce site. Let’s say we have a page that displays a product and has an order form with an “Add to cart” button, as well as a widget that allows the user to specify a quantity to purchase.

This app would be pretty simple to design. One approach would be to create three components:

You probably recognize this as a typical MVC-like pattern. There are lots of variations on MVC and a never-ending list of implementations.

However, MVC is not the problem. Product Management is. They now want you to display alive shopping cart in the right-hand margin of the page. The live shopping cart must show a list of all of the items in the cart, including the one being added, as well as recalculate the shipping costs, taxes, and the grand total.

The design language surrounding the new user interface introduced by Windows 8 and the Windows Phone operating system is a huge change from the old WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer) style of interface. There has been a huge shift in user interface design since the introduction of touch interfaces on devices.

This design language is not perfect and has a garnered a lot of criticism from some very established usability experts.

There are however some very interesting use cases in the Enterprise however, which I believe can greatly benefit from the new flat design offered by Metro/Windows 8 – in particular applications in the CRM/ERP space. I’ve seen many CRM and ERP implementations over the last decade which frankly were terrible.

The site gives you a video to understand prototypal inheritance in JavaScript. It shows a lot of different ways to create classes and subclasses and tells you which to use. Furthermore ther is an interactive Object graph which can visualize your javascript objects and how they relate following the prototype chain.

Let’s see if we can discover why :)

I could spend all the day writing sentences of why you should try Angular.js in your new project, but I feel it that would be better if we see it in action.

* Data binding and scopes

* Directives

* Services

Yes, most websites use jQuery these days (including all of Coursera), but it'd be better if there was a standard way to write UI libraries that did not depend on any libraries, and the UI library would only bring the libraries in that it truly needed. Plus, some of the best plugins are dependent on jQuery UI, since it includes the widget factory and offers features like draggable/sortable, and jQuery UI is a heavy addition to an app that isn't otherwise using it. It's also often difficult to use the jQuery UI JS without the CSS and its subsequent look & feel.

After trying to write some custom Coursera UI widgets as jQuery plugins, we decided that it might be more useful for us to start over and figure out how to architect our UI libraries for everything that we wanted out of them. We wanted many of the things that developers want in jQuery plugins, like customization and events, but we also wanted zero dependencies, AMD-compatibility, designer-friendly declarative usage, and more. 

NoFlo is a JavaScript implementation of Flow-Based Programming (FBP). Separating the control flow of software from the actual software logic. Helping you organize large applications easier than traditional OOP paradigms, especially when importing and modifying large data sets.

The MIT-licensed NoFlo library can either be used to run full flow-based applications or as a library for making complex workflows or asynchronous processes more manageable. It can also be used as an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tool in business applications.

NoFlo has been written in CoffeeScript for simplicity.

JavaScript, at its base, is a simple language that we continue to evolve with intelligent, flexible patterns.  We've used those patterns in JavaScript frameworks which fuel our web applications today.  Lost in JavaScript framework usage, which many new developers are thrust right into, are some of the very useful JavaScript techniques that make basic tasks possible.  Here are seven of those basics ...