JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

This is a getting started post on Ionic Framework & deploying the started template to PhoneGap Build.

When I read this article, I was pretty convinced that jQuery mobile is really killing PhoneGap & its abilities. jQuery mobile is actually awesome with its cross browser support & loading pages via Ajax, yada yada yada. But yes this is an overkill for a mobile app. We know what we are dealing with when we develop a hybrid app for a mobile. So why not use a user interface framework that will have only patches wrt mobile browsers!?

Contents:

* Introductions
* Set up Ionic
* Scaffold our First Ionic app
* Build & Test locally
* PhoneGap Build the app
* Troubleshooting

When you first get into JavaScript, using the native alert(), prompt(), and confirm() methods feels comfortable because they are "blocking" actions. This means that when those methods execute, the world stops and your code pauses until the user responds. The problem with this is that as user interfaces (UIs) get more complex and more richly designed, you often have to move to some sort of non-blocking form of these methods (such as Bootstrap modals). This can be a difficult transition. As such, I thought it would be a fun exercise to create promise-driven, non-blocking versions of alert(), prompt(), and confirm() in AngularJS so as to force an asynchronous mindset from the get-go.

SailsJS Services are pieces of reusable code that can be shared by your controllers. Your business logic should live in your Service (and not in your controller!). I know I am stepping on egg shells here, but unfortunately many web frameworks have bastarized the definition of models (the "M" in "MVC") and limited it only to where database stuff happens. However by definition Models are much more than your Data Access Layer. 

We can think of a module as a container for the different parts of our app – controllers, services, filters, directives, etc. Angular JS supports modules, using which we can divide the JavaScript code involved in our application. Creating modules not only helps separating the code into individual concerns but also improves unit-testability. The modules can be easily replaced by some mocks while unit testing Angular controllers.Every module should have a name, which is specified in the first parameter. Second parameter to module function is an array, which may contain names of other modules or services. If the module doesn’t depend on anything, the array can be left blank. 

Unit testing JavaScript is easy they said. It only takes a few seconds they said.

And they were right for the most part! Well, maybe seconds is an exaggeration but we can definitely achieve this with very few minutes

So you fired up your first hello world app using SailsJS, it was super simple and you started wondering if testing your app would be as simple. Soon after you realized this was not the case and much like everything else related to testing in JavaScript there is not just one right answer.

Perhaps you may have much more experience with SailsJS and have way gone beyond the hello world phase and now is time to make sure your application is reliable. Unit testing is part of the solution when it comes to code reliability.

In this course, Jack Franklin will teach you how to build NodeJS modules, both for your own internal, as well as for others to make use of. You'll learn how to structure Node modules, use npm, manage module dependencies, and so much more.

Let's suppose you wrote a SailsJS Controller and a SailsJS Service. You got them to work together, and now you want to mock the service while testing your controller.

The problem is that SailsJS magically injects Services -- and Models, and everything else -- into the Controller, making it difficult to simply call HelloController.index() without lifting SailsJS. We need the dependencies to be in place (otherwise we will get a bunch of ugly undefined is not a function kind of errors.

Fortunately, lifting SailsJS in code is almost as easy as running sails lift on your command line, and that is exactly what we are going to do in order run our tests.

Unit testing is really the painkiller pill that must be used by every developer depending on the technology or language he used to work with.
Now imagine that you write a unit test for every function or a couple of tests for every features of your software. So any new modification of your code that may lead to a bug or regression will be found and detected on the fly.

In my case, I have to find the best unit testing framework and what I mean by the best is: easy to use, easy to understand and easy to configure. Almost every Unit testing framework provide the minimum features I was looking for, I can give the example of Mocha, Jasmine and Qunit.

 I stumbled across Sails.js, the new kid on the block. It seemed very promising and addressed some issues that I had with Derby and with Meteor. Namely, both of those frameworks seem very tightly coupled from the client to the server and I wanted something that would provide more flexibility while still allowing me to develop rapidly. So, I decided to begin prototyping out my new side project in Sails and naturally I developed a variety of opinions to rant about. Enjoy.

These days, we believe in a principle that guides our whole approach to building modern applications: Build a REST API backend, then treat your Single Page Application just like any other client, with a separate codebase and separate server.

This blog post explains, at a high level, how our server architecture looks, and the reasoning behind it.