JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

This post contains a number of tips, tricks, and strategies that I have used over the last couple of years to debug Knockout applications. Feel free to share some of your own tips in the comments or suggest other areas that you would like to see discussed.

JavaScript evolves at a really fast pace. With such a big wave of fresh JavaScript technology splashing the web everyday it's a daunting task to keep up to date with all of it.

This is an exploration of Handlebars.js template library when used with Ember.js views. Many of the Handlebars.js tutorials on the web discuss the Handlebars API, but not in the specific context of using Handlebars with Ember.js. In addition to filling that void, I'll also give a brief background of JavaScript templating in general to provide perspective as to the problems it is solving.

THE REAL MVC. THE SMALLTALK MVC. THE GANG OF FOUR MVC.

The three core design patterns of MVC (observer, composite, and strategy) are embedded in Maria's Model, View, and Controller objects. Other patterns traditionally included in MVC implementations (e.g. factory method and template) make appearances too.

This is all fine but once we dive into inheritance things get messy fast. Because JavaScript uses prototypal inheritance (not class inheritance) we have to manually set up parent/child relationships, and in order to do that we have to be able to control what ‘this’ means during the construction of new objects from the child constructor. This will probably just be clear if I show you the code, annotated:

Since early this year I’ve been heavily involved in a JavaScript project, and the fact is that there’s a lot of confusion about how JavaScript passes variables around (the so called pass-by-value / pass-by-reference debate), and if you add to the combo the intricacies of prototype inheritance, evaluations contexts and several other quirks, you’ll realize how easy is to shoot yourself in the foot working with JavaScript.
So, after shooting myself in both feet, and also blowing away my head a couple of times, I decided to try to shred some light on this subject.
In order to do so I’ll present the following articles:

* Preparing the ambush
* Forensic report
* To reference or not to reference, that is the question
* Class struggles
* You start me on – a sane pattern for initializing objects
* Conclusions

* Array Direct Assignment

* Closure

* Constructor as type conversion tool

* Object.create as inheritance helper

The following content comes from the second module of my Pluralsight course entitled: Front-End First: Testing and Prototyping JavaScript Apps. The rest of the course covers an introduction to Unit Testing,Mocha (a JavaScript test runner), Grunt (a JavaScript task runner),Sinon.js (a mocking and spying library), Mockjax (a way to mock Ajax requests), mockJSON (a way to generate semi-random complex objects for prototyping), and more.

The move towards Single Page Apps and RESTful services open the doors to a much better way of securing web applications. Traditional web applications use browser cookies to identify a user when a request is made to the server. This approach is fundamentally flawed and causes many applications to be vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. When used correctly, RESTful services can avoid this vulnerability altogether. Before we go into the solution, lets recap the problem.

This series of tutorials will focus on using PhoneGap and AngularJs together in an iOS application. We will start off small but build upon the PhoneGap api to expose some AngularJs services so the both play nice together.