JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

At Carbon Five, we build quite a few AngularJS projects. It’s a fun, powerful framework that gets you up and running quickly, but once you’ve got your feet wet, you run into its infamous learning curve. AngularJS has a fair share of deep concepts; taking some time to understand them can get you back on track.

One of these important concepts is scopes. In an AngularJS application, the controller and view share an object called a scope; this object is at the core of its amazing two-way data binding. The controller sets properties on the scope, and the view binds to those properties. AngularJS takes responsibility for keeping the two in sync.

Let’s start with a simple example...

Super as in fashion supermodel, not supernatural power. SuperModel extend Backbone.Model directly and override several of Backbone.Model methods to add support for nested attributes and many other features.

With SuperModel we will have a (maybe) better way to deal with nested attributes. Here is the list of some features:

* Support nested set and get
* Support change events
* toJSON
* Support relations
* Support backward reference

Tready.js is a JavaScript framework, that allows running components in Node.js and the browser.

So we asked ourselves, “Wouldn’t it be nice to implement something once and use it in both environments?”. Luckily Node.js provides a way to run JavaScript on the server. Who knows, otherwise we might have ended up trying to run PHP in the browser.

We like to call this approach “Shared Code”, but it might be better known as “Isomorphic JavaScript”. We certainly weren’t the only ones thinking like this. Nodejitsu wrote about this in 2011 and Airbnb picked it up for their Rendr framework.

But we had more ideas. We wanted to build a modular thing similar to an app store, where you’d be able to choose from a pool of apps to put together a website.

You already know that Kendo UI has magnificent widgets. UI is in the name, and Telerik has a long proud history of building amazing UI components. What you may not know, is that you can actually use Kendo UI (specifically MVVM) to work with plain HTML to construct your own widgets. This is sort of like running on the bare metal, but it’s tons of fun and thanks to Kendo UI’s streamlined MVVM, it’s quite easy as well.

Knockout provides the ability to loop over a collection by implementing a for iterator. The power of this really can’t be underestimated since it allows you to take collections and render them visually with HTML getting fine grained control over how each of the items will look. The only problem with this, is that for loops can get unwieldy and don’t mix very gracefully in HTML attributes. This earned some bad rep for Knockout in it’s early days through no fault of the framework itself. Regardless of it’s tendency to clutter HTML, it’s a powerful construct that is noticeably absent from Kendo UI’s MVVM implementation. Or is it?

Using Node.js, we can create web applications easily. Now, thanks to the node-webkit we can also create desktop apps with it, using a unique combination of HTML5 and Node.

The library combines WebKit engine and Node.js in a unique way. Both WebKit and Node share the same context, allowing you to write your code like it's meant to be executed in a browser, but with the addition of all Node's features.

The list of uses is endless. You can create business apps, text and image editors, games, presentations, admin panels, etc. Just name the desktop app that you would like to create, and I can assure you that it will be possible with node-webkit.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to get started by showing you how to create a simple text editor.

Free open source HTML5 game engine for mobile and desktop with Canvas and WebGL rendering.

Features:

* Canvas/WebGL renderer
Pixi.js powered rendering with super fast speed.
* Physics engine
Hit detection and response with different shapes.
* Particle engine
Create special effects with particle engine.
* Tweening
Tween objects with timing, easing and looping.
* Timers
Add timers with callback functions and repeating.
* Mobile support
Make games for mobile and tablet devices.
* Sound manager
Manage sound effects and music with automatic looping.
* Modules
Split your game into modules and keep your code organized.

Today we can fulfill our dreams and improve the world we live in by building super-mega apps. This article describes the process of creating a hybrid application for Android OS.

A hybrid app combines features of web and native apps. As a native app, it can be distributed through the store and can take advantage of numerous features available on mobile devices. As a web app, it consists of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files.

This type of applications provides the following advantages:

• Almost all applications can be written in JavaScript for all mobile platforms;
• These apps can use some fancy features of a mobile device like a camera, an accelerometer, etc.;
• All HTML, CSS and JavaScript files can be instantly updated before a new version of an app is approved.

However, a hybrid app is slower than a native app. Nevertheless, it’s not a big deal because the slowest parts of your app can be written in Java or Objective-C and added to the next update.
Now let’s build an app and change the world!

In this tutorial we will be exploring the CreateJS suite of libraries. CreateJS is suite of JavaScript libraries and tools for building rich, interactive experiences with HTML5. The CreateJS suite is divided into four libraries.

* EaselJS - Makes working with HTML5 canvas easy.
* TweenJS - For tweening HTML5 and JavaScript properties
* SoundJS - Lets you easily work with HTML5 audio
* PreloadJS - Lets you manage and coordinate loading of assets

EaselJS is a library for working with the HTML5 canvas. It consists of a full, hierarchical display list, a core interaction model, and helper classes to make working with Canvas much easier. ...

Learn how to squeeze the most out of your Gruntfile, by splitting it across multiple files, autoloading, concurrent tasks and smart notifications.

In this article, we won’t focus on what numerous Grunt plugins do to your actual project code, but on the Grunt build process itself. We will give you practical ideas on:
* How to keep your Gruntfile neat and tidy,
* How to dramatically improve your build time,
* And how to be notified when a build happens.

Time for a quick disclaimer: Grunt is just one of many tools you could use to accomplish the task. If Gulp is more your style, great! If after surveying the options out there, you’d still like to build your own toolchain, that’s ok too! We chose to focus on Grunt for this article due to its strong ecosystem and long-standing user base.

The Javascript world is dominated by frameworks, and it is because of our reluctance to having dependencies in our libraries. If you are going to write a Javascript library, you have two options:

1. Depend on a proven framework.
2. Depend on no one.

If you choose option #1, you contribute to the worship of the framework.

If you choose option #2, you are faced with a problem. If you make it too small, it may not be useful enough to warrant a download (are you download-worthy?). What happens sometimes is a set of smaller functionalities get packaged up into a larger library to give users more value for the download. Another thing that tends to happen is established libraries get bigger over time as new techniques are discovered and new features invented, because this makes it easier for existing users.

As someone who likes to write small libraries, the dream for me, is this: I want easy dependencies: regardless of how many dependencies and/or nested dependencies my project has, I want to be able tell people "using my library is as easy as 1-2-3."

What I want is something like NPM.

Node-Webkit combines a Chromium runtime environment with node.js to provide an easy way to create a Desktop App with Web technologies. While it is easy to run local apps in a browser, necessary security restrictions prohibitaccess to local file systems. In addition, variations in browsers complicate web apps and can make the result unpredictable.

Node-Webkit provides a standalone executable for Mac, Windows or Linux, with consistent behavior on all platforms and more control over the user experience, while enabling the use of node.js features and libraries.

My presentation will include an overview of Node-Webkit, an explanation of how to use it, and a demonstration of an example app built with Node-Webkit.