JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

I thought the easiest way to learn more about AngularJS, Express and MongoDB would be to create a contact manager, where you can list/search/query your contacts and view more information about them.

There will be two parts to this article, part one is where I’m going to discuss the backend bit – that is the part which produces the JSON data from MongoDB, and the second part will discuss the frontend elements, running an Express server with AngularJS. Let’s start by discussing the database portion.

Angular offers several ways to interact with data from the server. The easiest way is to use the$resource factory, which lets you interact with RESTful server-side data sources. When we started the My Dashboard project, we were hoping to interact with a REST API, but soon found out that it didn't have all the data we needed. Rather than loading the page and then making another request to get its data, we decided to embed the JSON in the page. For communication back to the server, we used our tried-and-true Ajax solution:DWR.

The Weathertron is written in ClojureScript with Angular.js, backed by a weather forecast and almanac server written in Clojure on the JVM. This post outlines the motivation, benefits, and tradeoffs of this tech stack.

WHY NOT PLAIN CLOJURESCRIPT?

The early iterations of our first weather app, WeatherTable, were written in ClojureScript with the C2d ata visualization library to handle all view rendering. C2 (like its namesake, D3.js) uses pure functions to map data to the DOM...

In recent months, I have been sharing different versions of the Employee Directory sample application built with different technology stacks, different frameworks, and different back-end (REST services) implementations.

A number of you have asked for a modular version of the application built using RequireJS. So here it is.

I want to go more in-depth into what brackets is and why we chose it as our solution. This will be the first of a series of posts dedicated to brackets-shell and customizing it for your native HTML desktop applications.

Brackets is an open-source code editor created by Adobe. What makes brackets so cool, though, is that the entire editor is written in HTML and JavaScript.

Are you using jQuery because to have to? Is raw JavaScript more convoluted or difficult to use?

Part 1: the DOM and Forms

Part 2: CSS and Animation

Part 3: Events, Ajax and Utilities

I chose AngularJS because it seemed closer to what I know. More like Backbone. Data-binding is touted as Angular’s killer feature over Backbone, but there’s a lot more to Angular. I also chose Angular because everybody else here in the shop was learning Ember. What is wrong with me?

his week I was in the need to add the functionality of file upload to an AngularJS web application, on which I’m working for a personal project. Since my project also uses jQuery, I found that the better solution to build an asynchronous file uploader was to rely on the well known (and wonderful) jQuery plugin jquery.form, created by M. Alsup.

At the end I wrote an AngularJS directive to have a component, that I can reuse in my next projects. I will share it in this post.
Before digging into the code you can take a look at the live demo.

For all its warts and headaches, JavaScript has emerged as the lingua franca of the modern Web, arguably second in adoption only to HTML itself, which obviously is just a markup standard rather than a full-fledged programming language. It’s effectively impossible to launch a sophisticated Web project without making extensive use of JavaScript and AJAX dynamic loading.

An example app in Sockjs (sockjs-node) which emulates the bash terminal on the web. BDD blues in Nodejs when the app uses websockets & how to counter them.

Testing is really important when you write software. That is a fact. But the real question is what you should test. The simple answer is "everything possible."

A more fleshed out answer is that you should also avoid testing the same things multiple times.

For example, if you are testing your server-side API on the server, it would be redundant to test the entire API with client-side ajax calls as well.

Here are some of the basic places where tests are most important during the application life-cycle.