Raible Designs

The Art of AngularJS in 2015

I've been tracking statistics on jobs and skills for JavaScript MVC frameworks ever since I Compared JVM Web Frameworks at Devoxx France in 2013. At that time, Backbone was the dominant framework.

Last year, I updated those statistics for a presentation on AngularJS at Denver's Derailed. Angular had a similar amount of jobs as Backbone and a lot of people added it to their LinkedIn profiles. I found that Ember had grown around 300%, Backbone 200% and Angular 1000%!

Before presenting on AngularJS at last night's Denver Open Source Users Group, I updated these statistics once again. The charts below show how the number of jobs for Angular has doubled in the last year, while jobs for Ember and Backbone have fallen slightly. As far as skills, developers learning Ember and Backbone has increased 200%, while skilled Angular folks has risen 400%.

Yes, AngularJS has experienced huge growth in the last couple of years. You might even say it's the Struts of the JavaScript world.

For the presentation I delivered last night, I made a number of improvements over last year's. I added a live coding demo based on my Getting Started with AngularJS tutorial. I used IntelliJ's live templates to make it look easy. However, since the audience was quiet, and some were falling asleep, I skipped over the testing demo.

Testing AngularJS Applications

This article is the second in a series about learning AngularJS. It describes how to test a simple AngularJS application. In a previous article, Getting Started with AngularJS, I showed how to develop a simple search and edit feature.

What you'll learn

You'll learn to use Jasmine for unit testing controllers and Protractor for integration testing. Angular's documentation has a good developer's guide to unit testing if you'd like more information on testing and why it's important.

The best reason for writing tests is to automate your testing. Without tests, you'll likely be testing manually. This manual testing will take longer and longer as your codebase grows.

What you'll need

• About 15-30 minutes
• A favorite text editor or IDE. We recommend IntelliJ IDEA.
• Git installed.
• Node.js and NPM installed.

Getting Started with AngularJS

I was hired by my current client in November to help them choose a technology stack for developing modern web applications. In our first sprint, we decided to look at JavaScript MVC frameworks. I suggested AngularJS, Ember.js and React. Since most of the team was new to JavaScript MVC, I decided to create a tutorial for them. I tried to make it easy so they could learn how to write a simple web application with AngularJS. I thought others could benefit from this article as well, so I asked (and received) permission from my client to publish it here.

What you'll build

You'll build a simple web application with AngularJS. You'll also add search and edit features with mock data.

What you'll need

• About 15-30 minutes
• A favorite text editor or IDE. I recommend IntelliJ IDEA.
• Git installed.
• Node.js and NPM installed.

Developing an iOS Native App with Ionic

In my current project, I've been helping a client develop a native iOS app for their customers. It's written mostly in Objective-C and talks to a REST API. I talked about how we documented our REST API a couple days ago. We developed a prototype for this application back in December, using AngularJS and Bootstrap. Rather than using PhoneGap, we loaded our app in a UIWebView.

It all seemed to work well until we needed to read an activation code with the device's camera. Since we didn't know how to do OCR in JavaScript, we figured a mostly-native app was the way to go. We hired an outside company to do iOS development in January and they've been developing the app since the beginning of February. In the last couple weeks, we encountered some screens that seemed fitting for HTML5, so we turned back to our AngularJS prototype.

The prototype used Bootstrap heavily, but we quickly learned it didn't look like an iOS 7 app, which is what our UX Designer requested. A co-worker pointed out Ionic, developed by Drifty. It's basically Bootstrap for Native, so the apps you develop look and behave like a mobile application.

What is Ionic?
Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Built with Sass and optimized for AngularJS.

I started developing with Ionic a few weeks ago. Using its CSS classes and AngularJS directives, I was able to create several new screens in a matter of days. Most of the time, I was learning new things: how to override its back button behavior (to launch back into the native app), how to configure routes with ui-router, and how to make the $ionicLoading service look native. Now that I know a lot of the basics, I feel like I can really crank out some code.

Tip: I learned how subviews work with ui-router thanks to a YouTube video of Tim Kindberg on Angular UI-Router. However, subviews never fully made sense until I saw Jared Bell's diagram.

To demonstrate how easy it is to use Ionic, I whipped up a quick example application. You can get the source on GitHub at https://github.com/mraible/boot-ionic. The app is a refactored version of Josh Long's x-auth-security that uses Ionic instead of raw AngularJS and Bootstrap. To keep things simple, I did not develop the native app that wraps the HTML.

The Art of AngularJS

Last night, I had the pleasure of speaking at Denver's DeRailed about AngularJS. Fernand (the group's leader) asked me to speak in December, just after I'd finished a European speaking tour. The Modern Java Web Developer talk I created for that tour included a 20-minute AngularJS Deep Dive screencast. I figured it wouldn't be much work to augment the screencast and create an hour long talk, so I agreed.

When I started creating the presentation last week, I decided I didn't want to make the audience watch my screencast as part of the presentation. They could easily do that on their own time. So I wrote, from scratch, a brand new presentation on AngularJS. I tried to include all the things about Angular that I thought were important and useful for me in my learning process. The result is a presentation I'm proud of and enjoyed delivering.

You can click through it below, download it from my presentations page, or view it on SlideShare.

You might notice the presentation has a whole lot of code in it. Normally, when I copy/paste code into a presentation, I use IntelliJ IDEA and everything works. This time, there was something amiss between IDEA 13 and Keynote 6. I tried using IDEA's plugins (namely Copy on steroids and Copy as HTML), but none of them worked. IDEA 12 resulted in the same problem. Then I turned to other solutions. I installed highlight and copied code from the command line. This worked, but the fonts and colors weren't to my liking. Finally, I decided to try another editor: Sublime Text with SublimeHighlight. This worked great and I'm very happy with the results.

Most of my presentations end with a Questions/Contact slide. For this one, I added a few more: people to follow on Twitter, resources to learn from and projects with useful code. Below are a handful of links that greatly enhanced my AngularJS knowledge in the last year.

• Devoxx 2012 - Re-imagining the browser with AngularJS. This is the original video I watched about AngularJS. I learned enough from this one video to start developing my first app for a client. I wrote about it in a four-part series on Developing with AngularJS.
• ng-book: The Complete Book on AngularJS. A great book with all the nitty-gritty Angular details you ever wanted to know.
• David Mosher's Testing Strategies for AngularJS. I stumbled upon this a week ago and it's greatly enhanced my knowledge of how to test AngularJS apps. It also introduced me to Lineman, which I'm thankful for.
• Egghead.io - bit-sized videos of AngularJS knowledge. Very useful for when you want to learn how to do a specific thing quickly.
• AngularJS + REST + Spring Security. This is a sample application from Philip Sorst (ported to Spring Boot by my good friend Josh Long) that shows how to integrate AngularJS with Spring Security for stateless, token-based authentication.

One of the audience members at DeRailed recommended thinkster.io as a good resource too.

Thanks to Fernand for inviting me to speak and causing me to write this presentation. Creating it greatly improved my AngularJS knowledge and I learned about some new tools in the process. If you'd like to tap into my wealth of knowledge, I'm available for a new gig in April.

You shouldn't have to worry about front end optimization

After writing yesterday's article on optimizing AngularJS apps with Grunt I received an interesting reply from @markj9 on Twitter.

I clicked on the provided link, listened to the podcast (RR HTTP 2.0 with Ilya Grigorik) and discovered some juicy bits at around 27:00. The text below is from the podcast's transcript at the bottom of the page.

Using Grunt with AngularJS for Front End Optimization

I'm passionate about front end optimization and have been for years. My original inspiration was Steve Souders and his Even Faster Web Sites talk at OSCON 2008. Since then, I've optimized this blog, made it even faster with a new design, doubled the speed of several apps for clients and showed how to make AppFuse faster. As part of my Devoxx 2013 presentation, I showed how to do page speed optimization in a Java webapp.

I developed a couple AngularJS apps last year. To concat and minify their stylesheets and scripts, I used mechanisms that already existed in the projects. On one project, it was Ant and its concat task. On the other, it was part of a Grails application, so I used the resources and yui-minify-resources plugins.

The Angular project I'm working on now will be published on a web server, as well as bundled in an iOS native app. Therefore, I turned to Grunt to do the optimization this time. I found it to be quite simple, once I figured out how to make it work with Angular. Based on my findings, I submitted a pull request to add Grunt to angular-seed.

Below are the steps I used to add Grunt to my Angular project.

Developing with AngularJS - Part IV: Making it Pop

Welcome to the final article in a series on my experience developing with AngularJS. I learned its concepts, beat my head against-the-wall with and finally tamed it enough to create a "My Dashboard" feature for a client. For previous articles, please see the following:

• Part I: The Basics
• Part II: Dialogs and Data
• Part III: Services

The last mile of development for the My Dashboard feature was to spice things up a bit and make it look better. We hired a design company to come up a new look and feel and they went to work. Within a week, we had a meeting with them and they presented a few different options. We picked the one we liked the best and went to work. Below are screenshots that I used to implement the new design.

Developing with AngularJS - Part III: Services

This is the 3rd article in a series on my experience developing with AngularJS. I used AngularJS for several months to create a "My Dashboard" feature for a client and learned a whole bunch of Angular goodness along the way. For previous articles, please see Part I: The Basics and Part II: Dialogs and Data.

Angular offers several ways to interact with data from the server. The easiest way is to use the $resource factory, which lets you interact with RESTful server-side data sources. When we started the My Dashboard project, we were hoping to interact with a REST API, but soon found out that it didn't have all the data we needed. Rather than loading the page and then making another request to get its data, we decided to embed the JSON in the page. For communication back to the server, we used our tried-and-true Ajax solution: DWR.

In Angular-speak, services are singletons that carry out specific tasks common to web apps. In other words, they're any $name object that can be injected into a controller or directive. However, as a Java Developer, I tend to think of services as objects that communicate with the server. Angular's documentation on Creating Services shows you various options for registering services. I used the angular.Module api method.

Developing with AngularJS - Part II: Dialogs and Data

A couple of days ago, I wrote an article on how I started developing with AngularJS. I used AngularJS for several months to develop a "My Dashboard" feature for a client's product and learned a whole bunch of stuff along the way.

This article provides an overview of how I changed some of My Dashboard's features to use Angular instead of jQuery. After finishing the prototype work in January, we started moving bits and pieces into the main application. We kept the same file names for our Angular-related files and copied them into the project.

All these files are packaged up into a dashboard.js file that's included at the bottom of our Dashboard page. While our prototype used jQuery 1.9 and jQuery UI 1.10, the application's codebase used jQuery 1.7.1 and jQuery UI 1.8.3. Luckily, this didn't present a problem as everything continued to work as expected.

Around this time, we also had many discussions with the Product Team about charts. Since Highcharts required we purchase a license, we took at look at AnyChart, which we were already using. We were able to get AnyChart to work with our existing chart directive with minimal changes. Most changes were in the JSON itself.

We committed the first pass (with sample data still hard-coded) in mid-February.