JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

This article is written for intermediate to advanced developers using AngularJS to build production applications, who would like to reduce some of the pain of testing. It is my hope that feeling secure in testing workflow will enable the reader to practice a TDD workflow and build a more solid app.

Purpose of this page is to show my solution for a basic ajax crafted autocomplete service. Since I ran into 1001 problems, I assume this may help others, too.

I guess the first thing you need to understand about the concept of custom bindings is that it they are there to integrate external behaviours into the knockout pattern. What this means is that it allows you control what happens in the UI when an observable has changed and vice versa

Backbone.js is easily extendable. We’ve seen it happen with the likes of Backbone.Relational, Backbone.Validation and other small but important improvements over the basic Backbone library.

Existing Backbone.js code bases can benefit a lot by adding more power to Backbone itself. I think directives will be a good addition and I’ve set to do it.

Fortunately, it turns out to be very easy to use jquery plugins inside of React classes so I just used typeahead.js as is. For the StructureMap diagnostics, I wanted a search bar that allowed users to search for all the assemblies, namespaces, and types configured in the main application container with typeahead recommendations. Since I was going to want to reuse that search bar on a couple different little screens, I did things the idiomatic way React wants to be used anyway and created the small component shown below...

My latest client project is a fairly big and complex app, with a lot of small modules for views. In order to keep my code nice and DRY, some good-old-fashioned inheritance has done the trick.

ECMAScript 6 (ES6) still sounds like something from a far-away future. After all, it will only become a standard by mid 2015. However, its features are continually appearing in browsers and there are compilers that translate ES6 code to ES5 code. The latter is already a compelling solution, because the ECMAScript 6 feature set is already frozen.

This blog post gives a brief overview of ECMAScript 6 features and describes tools that enable you to use them today.

Yadda brings true BDD to JavaScript test frameworks such as Jasmine, Mocha, QUnit, Nodeunit, WebDriverJs and CasperJS. By true BDD we mean that the ordinary language (e.g. English) steps are mapped to code, as opposed to simply decorating it. This is important because just like comments, the decorative steps such as those used by Jasmine, Mocha and Vows can fall out of date and are a form of duplication.

Yadda's BDD implementation is like Cucumber's in that it maps the ordinary language steps to code. Not only are the steps less likely to go stale, but they also provide a valuable abstraction layer and encourage re-use. You could of course just use CucumberJS, but we find Yadda less invasive and prefer it's flexible syntax to Gherkin's. Yadda's conflict resolution is smarter too.

Ocrad.js is a pure-javascript version of the Ocrad project, automatically converted using Emscripten. It is a simple OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program that can convert scanned images of text back into text. 

The main thing about AngularJS is that it allows us to extend the capabilities of HTML to serve the purpose of today's dynamic webpages. In this article I will show you how you can use AngularJS's Directives to make your development faster, easier and your code more maintainable. | Difficulty: Intermediate; Length: Medium; Tags: AngularJS, JavaScript