JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

A common question when looking at AngularJS for the first time is about how to combine it with existing JavaScript code and components. For jQuery UI in particular, the team around AngularJS has created the AngularUI project (http://angular-ui.github.com/) which provides an easy way to use jQuery UI with Angular.). For other frameworks - or especially for your custom DOM-manipulating code - the necessary steps might not be as obvious at the first glance.

Most existing components (especially in the jQuery-world) usually work in a different way. Without Angular, when you wanted to achieve a certain behavior, like displaying a date-picker, you would usually go with a jQuery UI extension (like 'datepicker') and use call similar to $("#someinput").datepicker({...}). This would extend a standard <input> element with an ID of someinput to be turned into a datepicker.

In this command's options, you would have usually specified a callback to be invoked whenever the user selects/changes the date in the input box. But you wouldn't do this just for a single datepicker -- no, this kind of jQuery UI-extension would be littered throughout your business code for nearly every input control in your HTML. After all, your datepickers need access to the underlying model values to restrict the input to valid ranges and to perform additional validation if necessary. This mix of business code and DOM-manipulating code is sometimes the reason for maintenance headaches of JavaScript developers.

With this in mind, you can see the conundrum: how do you take classic JavaScript code (with this mix of DOM interactions and event handlers with direct manipulation of underlying business objects) and put it into the well defined structure of AngularJS?

Nowadays, with any Web app you build, you have dozens of architectural decisions to make. And you want to make the right ones: You want to use technologies that allow for rapid development, constant iteration, maximal efficiency, speed, robustness and more. You want to be lean and you want to be agile. You want to use technologies that will help you succeed in the short and long term. And those technologies are not always easy to pick out.

In my experience, full-stack JavaScript hits all the marks. You’ve probably seen it around; perhaps you’ve considered its usefulness and even debated it with friends. But have you tried it yourself? In this post, I’ll give you an overview of why full-stack JavaScript might be right for you and how it works its magic.

NodeCloud is a resource directory gathering sites related to Node.js and ordering them by their Alexa traffic, allowing to evaluate relative popularity of a project.

Please note that for the ranking to be relevant, only sites fully dedicated to Node.js and hosted on their own domain (Alexa do not provide separate rankings for subdomains) can be indexed.

Web Components are going to fundamentally change the nature of HTML.

At first glance, they may seem like a complicated set of new technologies, but Web Components are built around a simple premise. Developers should be free to act like browser vendors, extending the vocabulary of HTML itself.

If you’re intimidated by these new technologies or haven’t experimented with them yet, this post has a very simple message for you. If you’re already familiar with HTML elements and DOM APIs, you are already an expert at Web Components.

In this tutorial we will go through a process of building a sample shopping cart with real time capabilities. On top of that, we'll also throw in a real time admin order overview.

The technologies used will include:

* Knockout.js - for reactive client side data binding

* ASP.NET Web API - as an API to retrieve data and send orders to the server side

* SignalR - to notify interested parties in changes to the item stock quantities & order status

Since the topic of building a functional e-commerce solution is obviously extremely broad, we will take a few simplifications, which will allow us to focus our attention on the real time aspects of the cart and avoid distractions. We will treat security (user login/logout) and data persistence (we'll just store the data in memory) as out of scope.

Promises provide a compelling alternative to raw callbacks when dealing with asynchronous code. Unfortunately, promises can be confusing and perhaps you’ve written them off. However, significant work has been done to bring out the essential beauty of promises in a way that is interoperable and verifiable. The result is Promises/A+, a specification that is making its way into promise libraries and even the DOM.

So what are promises all about and what do they offer when writing Node applications?

Documenting code is a rough, but necessary evil. Having a well maintained and documented code base can ease new developers into your code base and also help keep tabs on certain pieces of your application.

YUIDoc is a node app that assists in parsing certain JavaScript comments out to generate API documentation. Here are some of the basics of the syntax for documentation.

It allows you to tag pieces of your application to be processed for later documentation.

The web is changing. JavaScript frameworks like Durandal are rising and more and more applications are created this way, offering excellent user experiences. But, is the web ready for this movement? Let's just say that it's a "work in progress".

There are a lot of things we have to be aware of when developing a dynamic JavaScript application and one of the most important things is SEO. When we develop a Durandal application and make it available to the world, one of the first things we would like to see is the application being indexed by google. But without any configuration, the only thing we will see indexed is the root page of our site. What's the problem? I created one of my best web applications, the users love it, it's quick and optimized...but nobody can enjoy it because google can't see it.

What googlebot can see is our index page and nothing more, and the reason is because our content is generated dynamically and the web hasn't traditionally worked this way. We may think "times are changing" and Google should be aware about this...and of course it is. But to take advantage of it we have to make some changes in our application first.

Eliminate HTTP requests for JavaScript files and serve differential updates to your users on the fly.

Minimize HTTP Requests - DynoSRC loads JavaScript files inline in your HTML response, then stores them in localStorage. You can even inline the DynoSRC client lib, eliminating all HTTP requests for JavaScript on your site.

Differential Updates - Now, if a JS asset on your site changes, your users will have to download it again even though just a fraction of it changed. DynoSRC sends down differentials updates, so changes to large files don't require full downloads.

About a year and a half ago I announced a library named Fog (for F#) that had the goal of making it very easy to use F# to work with the Windows Azure API for .NET. Today, I'm proud to announce the release of FogJS, which has a similar goal for JavaScript/Node.js development.

FogJS currently supports 3 of the more popular Azure services: Blob Storage, Table Storage, and Service Bus. One of the most broad features in FogJS is that of support for promises. In fact, almost every function provided by the Azure SDK for Node.js has been replicated in Fog with the results returned as a promise (with the help of Q.js).

The second big feature is related to making it as easy as possible to interact with Azure. This is primarily accomplished with "simplified functions" that follow a convention over configuration approach.