JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

In this article I have tried to capture the common design and coding mistakes JavaScript developers tend to make. The intended audience for this article is JavaScript beginners with a few years of programming experience. 

AngularJS, the Superheroic JavaScript MVV Framework, simplifies many of the challenges associated with developing single-page web applications. AngularJS is a full-featured framework, but we are just going to look at its most conceptually unique feature: directives.

Directives are used to add new syntax and behavior to the DOM. Angular ships with its own set of directives, but also gives us the ability to create our own. Using directives, we can extract complex and repetitive parts of our user interface into easily reusable building blocks.

Bower is a package manager for the web.
Components are self-contained packages of different kinds of assets, but most often JavaScript.

Although AngularJS is packed with powerful directives out of the box, often times we want to create our own reusable functionality. In this post, we'll focus on how to tackle the seemingly complex process of creating directives. We'll start with building simple directives and explain the process throughout the post.

To start making your own directive, let's first understand what directives actually are. Directives, in AngularJS are, at their core functions that get run when the DOM is compiled by the compiler.

Using this powerful concept, AngularJS enables us to create new directives that we can encapsulate and simplify DOM manipulation. We can create directives that modify or even create totally new behavior in HTML.

A short introduction and overview of Web Components - what is this new HTML5 technology, why it's needed for development, and how it helps website builders.

Ext JS has been getting more flexible with each release. You can do many more things with it these days than you used to be able to, but there has been a performance cost associated with that. In many cases this performance degradation is down to the way the framework is being used, as opposed to a fundamental problem with the framework itself.

There’s a whole bunch of things that you can do to dramatically speed up the performance of an app you’re not happy with, and Nige “Animal” White took us through them this morning.

implementing real time notifications similar to twitter, stackoverflow..etc using Knockout JS and SignalR.

In this post, we will implement real time notification when any new post or comment is added and display it on notification click using Knockout JS and SignalR. You might think .. Why notification? Why not to display in real time? If we display it in real time, It will irritate users. Suppose you are reading a post middle of the page, suddenly few new posts appear on top then the post you are reading go down and you have to scroll down to find where it is. That’s why in twitter or Stackoverflow,the notification is used when any new post is arrived and you can check them on notification click. We will implement the same thing for both posts and comments.

With KnockoutJS, it’s easy to bind two different elements to a single observable.

But it’s a little more complicated if you want to find a single element to two different observables.

The solution is to make one binding in markup and the second one with code (or just do both bindings in code).

Everyone has seen scroll based animations right? You know, the ones where you start scrolling down the webpage and animations start triggering around depending on how much you have scrolled.

Now, sometimes we want to trigger an animation, but we don't want to make theentire page to rely on the scroll... maybe, just a little part of it. However, we can't trigger the animation until the user is viewing the part we want to animate, or else the animation will do all its magic without no audience. How do we do it?

Sometimes you need database functionality but want to avoid the constraints that come with installing a full-blown solution. Maybe you are writing a Node service or web application that needs to be easily packageable, such as a continuous integration server. Maybe you’re writing a desktop application with Node Webkit, and don’t want to ask your users to install an external database. That’s when you needNeDB.

NeDB is a lightweight database written entirely in Javascript, and that implements the well-known and loved MongoDB API. It is packaged as a Node module that be used with a simple require and can be used as an in-memory only or persistent datastore. You can think of it as SQLite for MongoDB projects.

An increasingly popular trend lately is to have the client handle rendering of your content. So, long server side rendering has been replaced with some fancy JavaScript libraries.
So we are going to build AngularBanking – A rudimentary online banking application that allows the user to login, view balances of their accounts, change the description of the account, view history and perform transfers between each account.

Both of these frameworks define a reference architecture for developing single page web applications, providing developers with the means to:

* declaratively construct a user interface from constituent components,
* correlate user interface gestures to corresponding business logic,
* retrieve and persist data to data sources, and
* structure application logic in a manner that enforces separation of concerns.
However, these two frameworks go about solving these problems through fundamentally different approaches.

Irrespective of the two frameworks being evaluated here, we think the criteria discussed here are equally applicable to any web application development framework. Even if you aren’t evaluating Sencha’s frameworks or AngularJS, we hope the questions posed above will be useful as you explore the vast ecosystem of the web platform.

The gist of the application is to allow users to sign up and be able to share financial tips. I will document my journey along for others who are thinking of travelling down the same road, starting with my choice of technologies, this being my first attempt at building up the whole architecture from the ground up and since I am a front end developer and I wanted to leverage that experience to build a mobile app instead of going native.

When deciding on the initial approach to building the app, I initially thought about using Sencha Touch. I had tried Titanium before but had found it unwieldy although I like the whole integrated IDE to production setup. I work with ExtJS on a daily basis so I figured Sencha Touch would be a natural complement but after working with AngularJS, I really did want to keep getting better at it and not have to duplicate my learning by both doing Angular and Sencha Touch at the same time so i settled on PhoneGap.