JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

JavaScript is a flexible and powerful programming language that drives most modern-day web sites and applications. The jQuery library, in particular, has a simple API for traversing and manipulating the DOM. Just choose a your selector, add an event handler, and voilà! Instant UI magic. The ease of jQuery, though, comes with a price. Without much thought in organizing your code, it’s easy to end up with a hot mess of jQuery selector soup -- and that’s the last thing we want in a complex application like ours.

In this blog post, I will show you the case for object-oriented design in a functional language like JavaScript, using examples from Wealthfront's codebase.

It’s likely that your Ember app is going to require some configuration or environment data as it grows: deployment environment name, feature flags, locale strings and so on.

What’s the best way to handle this requirement? There are a couple of ways you could handle this, but here’s a technique I’ve seen in the wild and that works for me.

Since it is Node.js, every action you do that touches the database or file system really wants to be asynchronous. I started by using promises with the Bluebird library, and it was okay for simple cases. However, the code became very hard to follow when I started chaining more than 3-4 operations together. Just this week I finally got a chance to try out the usage of the new ES6 generators feature with my codebase in the places where I was having to combine so many asynchronous operations and I’m very happy with the results so far.

To my eyes, generators are a big improvement in readability over promises. Consider two versions of the same method from my event store library.

Many large Angular applications tend to see a lot of repetition - same API endpoint, same method of dealing with and transforming data, etcetera. One technique you can use to at least alleviate that is using AngularJS's decorate method, which allows you to extend, adjust or even fully replace any existing service.

As you'll see in this post, using this allows you to modify and extend the framework you build your app in, which will lead to a cleaner, more legible codebase, written in a more functional style (the what, not the how).

Today I want to show a generic workflow and setup I have used a lot lately when working on building apps with Angular. It uses Gulp as a CI system and Browserify to minimize code clutter and maximize awesomeness. So let's jump in.

tcomb is a library for Node.js and browser which allows you to check the types of JavaScript values at runtime with a simple syntax. It is great for checking external input, for testing and for adding safety to your internal code. Bonus points:

• write complex domain models in a breeze and with small code footprint
• easy debugging
• instances are immutables by default
• encode/decode of domain objects to/from JSON for free
• gradually make your existing code safer

wu.js aims to provide higher order functions for ES6 iterables. Some of them you already know (filter, some, reduce) and some of them might be new to you (reductions,takeWhile). wu.js works with all ES6 iterables, including Arrays, Maps, Sets, and generators you write yourself. You don't have to wait for ES6 to be fully implemented by every JS engine, wu.js can be compiled to ES5 with the Tracuer compiler.

angularjs-styleguide - AngularJS Style Guide: A starting point for AngularJS development teams to provide consistency through good practices.

The technology should serve the team. I think Angular does that well, but other solutions may be a better fit for your team, given experience, mindset, project history, or other factors.

Angular covers a good range of functionality for building robust web applications. Wintellect has used Angular successfully on very large enterprise projects, using hundreds of controllers, services, and directives. It worked well for us on a large, distributed team.