JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

In the previous posts (1, 2, 3) I covered creating an Ember.js-based single page application, then wiring it up to Windows Azure Mobile Services for data storage. But currently it allows everyone to post anonymously. I at least want some basic authentication so I can verify the user is a real person and maybe hold them accountable for things they post.

Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it trivially easy to set up authentication using Facebook, Google, Microsoft account (formerly LiveID), or Twitter as the authentication provider.

Use a T4 template to generate Knockout-viewmodels based on .NET classes.

This article describes a solution to this problem by using T4 templates to generate the JavaScript Knockout models automatically based on the .NET classes. The resulting Knockout models are extendable so as to be able to add additional functions and (computed) properties client-side. Finally, I also added an IsDirty feature that can indicate if the model has been modified since it's data was set.

Last week I created a new single page application using Ember.js as the client framework (see Part 1 and Part 2). Today, I finish up the application by adding Windows Azure Mobile Services for data storage.

Mobile Services is a preview feature of Windows Azure, so you may need to enable the preview for your account. Once you've done this, perform the following steps to create a new service and get the HTML and JavaScript code to add a client to the application.

The concept of “Promises” has changed the way we write asynchronous JavaScript. Over the past year, many frameworks have incorporated some form of the Promise pattern to make asynchronous code easier to write, read and maintain. For example, jQuery added $.Deferred(), and NodeJS has the Q and jspromisemodules that work on both client and server. Client-side MVC frameworks, such as EmberJS and AngularJS, also implement their own versions of Promises.

But it doesn’t have to stop there: we can rethink older solutions and apply Promises to them. In this article, we’ll do just that: validate a form using the Promise pattern to expose a super simple API.

I have had a love/hate relationship with regular expressions in the past. Reading or writing a regular expression typically made me feel like I was toying with a broken Rubiks Cube. However, after I would fiddle an expression into submission, almost by accident, and it did its job, I would become enamored with its brevity and power.

I’ve realized that Backbone.js implements a certain concept of the well known and used design pattern – MVC.
When I started working on Echoes Media Center I wanted to apply best practices in the architecture of this application – one that I can make use for any application. I wanted to find a good and solid application framework.
After reading several articles, I decided to brainstorm the concept of MVC and have a more thorough look into it – to see how I can use it wisely enough.
I took the very simple concept that Backbone.js applied to Models and Views.

One of the killer features of KidoZen is the mobile line of business(LOB) APIs. This capability extends our mobile backend as a service (mBaaS) layer by enabling the integration with corporate system whether those are hosted on-premise or using a SaaS models. Using our line of business APIs developers can build enterprise-ready mobile apps that seamlessly integrate with corporate systems without having to figure out the intricacies using a super simple and mobile-first model.

Today I continue building the application started in Part 1 by adding navigation and some basic routes and templates.

At this point, the application has a few static pages, a controller to handle submission of new forms, but that's about it. In the next post I'll wire up Windows Azure Mobile Services to store blog posts, change the posts.hbs to display a list of posts, and add a route and template to handle displaying individual posts.

Last week I created a new single page application using Ember.js as the client framework (see Part 1 and Part 2). Today, I finish up the application by adding Windows Azure Mobile Services for data storage.

Mobile Services is a preview feature of Windows Azure.

To wire Mobile services to Ember, I used ember-model. Why? It provides a basic framework with the assumption that you will bring your own data access; you just implement the create/save/etc. functions that are already stubbed out.

Glue is a deliberately simple JavaScript application framework, built on top of Liquid.js and jQuery. The library lets you build an application from modules. Each module is stylable with Liquid Markup. And modules communicate with the rest of the aplication through events and through shared getter and setter properties.

The philosophy behind Glue is simplicity and it’s right there in the name: It’s about building modular apps with HTML, CSS, Liquid – and glueing them together with as little JavaScript logic as possible.

Creating bindings in Ember.js at run-time can be challenging. A pair of observers, instead of a direct binding, alleviated some of our problems.

Over the next few blog posts I'll go through the process of creating a single page blogging application using Ember.js that uses Windows Azure Mobile Services for data storage, and then deploy it to a Windows Azure Web Site.

Single page applications normally have an .html page that acts as a container for the JavaScript that is the brains of the application. This JavaScript is responsible for generating the information displayed in the browser based on templates, and handles routing you between 'pages' (really just loading different templates) and communicating with data sources such as a remote REST API to retrieve data used by the templates.

Ember.js provides an model-view-controller (MVC) approach to designing a single page application, where the model and controller are implemented in JavaScript and the view is implemented in Handlebars, a templating language.