JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

This free book is what I wanted when I started working with single page apps. It's not an API reference on a particular framework, rather, the focus is on discussing patterns, implementation choices and decent practices.

I'm taking a "code and concepts" approach to the topic - the best way to learn how to use something is to understand how it is implemented. My ambition here is to decompose the problem of writing a web app, take a fresh look at it and hopefully make better decisions the next time you make one.

* Introduction

* Writing maintainable code

* Implementation alternatives: a look at the options

* Meditations on Models & Collections

* Views - templating, behavior and event consumption

In a normal web site, integration of DISQUS to your pages is easy, you sign up for DISQUS, get the JavaScript Universal Code for web sites, add it where you want your discussion thread to show up in your page. When web page loads, DISQUS loads the required Javascript and adds it to the section of your page. By default DISQUS will use the page url as the key to the discussion and manages unique thread ids for your posts and replies within that.

Now with this model we have a problem, in a SPA, there is no “pages” its all one “single” page with routes (by some convention) managing the loading of various views. So if you simply paste DISQUS code where you want the discussion to show up in your SPA view html page, result will be disappointing! At least it was for me the first time. Again to my defense, it was late in the night and I was not thinking clearly. When the page ran, it did not load anything…blank! Problem is that if you add a JS snippet to your view code, its not going to work in a SPA architecture.

Many developers struggle with how to organize an application's code base once it grows in size. I've seen this recently in AngularJS and JavaScript applications but historically it's been a problem across all technologies including many Java and Flex apps I've worked on in the past.

The general trend is an obsession with organizing things by type. It bears a striking resemblance to the way people organize their clothing.

Every major open-source project has its own style guide: a set of conventions (sometimes arbitrary) about how to write code for that project. It is much easier to understand a large codebase when all the code in it is in a consistent style.

“Style” covers a lot of ground, from “use camelCase for variable names” to “never use global variables” to “never use exceptions.” This project holds the style guidelines we use for Google code. If you are modifying a project that originated at Google, you may be pointed to this page to see the style guides that apply to that project.

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Asynchronous patterns are becoming more common and more important to moving web programming forward. They can be challenging to work with in JavaScript. To make asynchronous (or async) patterns easier, JavaScript libraries (like jQuery and Dojo) have added an abstraction called promises (or sometimes deferreds). With these libraries, developers can use promises in any browser with good ECMAScript 5 support. In this post, we’ll explore how to use promises in your web applications using XMLHttpRequest2 (XHR2) as a specific example.

... because loading 92Ko of jQuery to use less than 2% of it kind of sucks. Mostly inspired by Doing without jQuery and From jQuery to JavaScript: A Reference.

* Selectors

* Attributes

* Styles

* Events

* Others