JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Tomasz Janczuk has created Edge.js, which allows users to combine the power of .NET with Node.js. Curious about how to add non-blocking communication to your .NET project? Looking for a way to move computationally intensive code out of your Node thread? Janczuk's article provides a great starting point on how Edge works and the benefits it can bring to your next application.

This is the first edition in what I hope will be a multi-part series covering Ember. In this screencast, I give some background information on who and how this screencast might help you get started with using Ember to build real production applications.

A big part of the learning curve to Ember is in the setup. What's important to me is to find a way to separate my front-end & back-end codebases without inconveniencing my development workflow. As a result, this guide will show you how to build an Ember project with Lineman that proxies API requests back to a separate Rails application which will provide a JSON API using ActiveModel::Serializers.

I have developed this simple app for my personal use for just adding bookmarks with priority range from 1 to 5. I mainly created this for following github repositories with a priority so tat I can look on these bookmarks and evaluate it later based on the priority.

Here’s the technology stack used for the demo app:

* REST API – Node.js and Hapi.js
* Data Persistence – Microsoft Azure Table
* Web App – AngularJS

Gillie is a lightweight MVC framework inspired in Backbone. It provides useful methods to perform RESTful HTTP requests and allows for a separation of concerns using models, views and handlers. On the other hand offers an events API with which you can make your views listen for model events and take the appropriate actions, following in that way the observer design pattern.

Gillie follows an MVC design, however, the controller is called handler. The idea behind the handler is to listen for DOM events, get their data, and pass it to the model to save it. Once the model finishes saving the data, will trigger an event that usually the view was listening for in order to repaint the DOM.

One of the most confusing parts for people coming from Rails (or any other backend web application framework) it’s that what Ember.js calls MVC is very different to what other frameworks call MVC.

To understand what MVC is in both frameworks I recommend watching Yehuda Katz presentation: A tale of two MVC’s.

Instead of talking about MVC, Yehuda proposes an unified model for GUI programming which is composed by a series of steps and then explains how different frameworks handle each step.

The following are the steps mention by Yehuda and the components in charge of each in both Ruby on Rails and Ember.js...

Solving modals in Ember.js was such a major PITA for me. I googled a lot and read everything I could only to find as many different approaches as posts, which of none felt like a good fit for me. This post probably just fuels that fire with another approach but this is my way to Master your modals in Ember.js.

So, for this demo we’ll be using Bootstrap, mostly to simplify things. It’s really just the Modal part of Bootstrap we’re interested in but I went ahead and included the full package. 

Testing can be hard and Ember doesn't exactly have the greatest resources for testing. QUnit is the "official" testing framework for Ember.js apps and it has the most resources dedicated to it which can make using something like Jasmine a bit harder.

Ember requires a bit of setup to get working properly with Jasmine. Before anything else, we need to set up our helpers/spec_helper.js file. The following code sets Ember up for testing, gives us our test helpers, and even puts a small div showcasing our app in the bottom right corner...

Angular is hot. And with good reason. Angular is a complete framework for building client-side JavaScript applications and includes the features you look for in a framework, such as:

* Two way data binding
* Model-View-Whatever
* Testability
* Dependency Injection
* Templates
* Routing
* View Composition
* Animation
* Patterns and a robust eco-system
* Promises
* Extensibility
In this first in a series of Angular posts, I’ll review creating a simple Angular application that shows off some of Angular’s features without writing any JavaScript at all.

We’ll see how to power an AngularJS Single Page Application using both ASP.NET Web API and SignalR for back-end data services. You’ll learn how to get started building web applications with AngularJS, how to leverage HTML5 features like local storage and pushState, providing efficient server resources via HTTP and web sockets (sing SignalR), important routing configuration concerns, testing and deployment.