Raible Designs

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.

Video of Comparing JVM Web Frameworks from Devoxx France

Whenever I do a talk, I get requests for a recording of it. It's rare that recordings are made, but when they are, I like to share them. In March of this year, I traveled to Devoxx France and had a great time. One of the talks I delivered was Comparing JVM Web Frameworks, with a bit of a twist from prior versions.

I started reading The Paradox of Choice and found many parallels to the agony that developers experience with choosing a web framework. I described how I didn't think good framework decisions were based on the many, many features that frameworks have, but often on pre-defined constraints. There's those lucky developers that get to choose a Full Stack Framework because they're doing greenfield development. Then there's those that want a better Pure Web Framework that replaces something (e.g. Struts) that's not satisfying their needs. And lastly, there's those that've found it possible to leverage a SOFEA and use a JavaScript MVC framework with an API Framework on the backend. I don't think it makes sense to compare all web frameworks and I tried to use these pre-defined constraints (language, platform and application type) argument to separate into categories and help make choosing easier.

The good folks at Parleys have published the video of this talk. If you haven't heard of Parleys, it's an awesome platform for watching conference talks. As their Mission Statement says: If YouTube and Slideshare would make a baby then it would be named Parleys.

Below is an embedded video of this presentation - I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I did delivering it!

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.

Father's Day Weekend on The Colorado River

I've been writing about Father's Day since this blog was first born. It all started with my first Father's Day in 2003, continued in 2004 (the year I bought The Bus), 2005 and 2006. In 2008, I started the Father's Day Camping Trip tradition and it's been a blast ever since. We spent a couple years at the Great Sand Dunes and a year at Lake Granby. Last year, we changed things up a bit and headed to The Oregon Coast. This year, we brought back the camping tradition, packed up the raft we bought last year and headed for the Upper Colorado River.

On Saturday, we put in at Rancho del Rio and took out at Two Bridges. This stretch took about 4 hours, which was perfect considering we didn't put in until 2pm. Saturday night, we camped at Catamount, then started early Sunday floating from Catamount to Pinball (9 miles). We got on the river around 10 and disembarked 5½ hours later.

Developing with AngularJS - Part I: The Basics

There's many, many different introductions to AngularJS available on the internet. This article is not another introduction, but rather a story about my learning experience. It all started way back in January of this year. I was working as a UI Architecture Consultant at Taleo/Oracle, my client for the last 21 months. My gig there ended last month, but they agreed to let me publish a series of articles about the knowledge I gained.

Project Background

The Director of Product Management had been working on the concepts for a new project - codenamed "Visual MyView". Below is a mockup he created for our kickoff meeting on January 4th.

From his original email about the above mockup:

I started the initial layout with static HTML and CSS and had a wireframe to show by mid January.

By the end of January, we'd renamed the project to My Dashboard and had a working prototype using CoolClock and moment.js for the clock in the top right, AngularJS to display widget data, jQuery UI for drag-n-drop of rows and widgets, Bootstrap's Carousel for holding charts and Highcharts for rendering charts.

Life Update

For the past several years, I've written "farewell to ski season" posts at the end of April. This year, I intended to as well, but I never knew it was going to end!

A lot's been going on since I last wrote here. First of all, the end of the ski season was fantastic! The last week in Winter Park was the best skiing of the year. The first (Tuesday) afternoon, I started skiing around 1pm and it snowed all afternoon - resulting in several inches by the end of the day. The next day was smooth and empty, followed by a day of deep powder and knee-deep runs down Eagle Wind. I had one of the best runs of my life that day.

While the snow was great at the end (and far better than last year), I didn't get as many days as I'd like. Only 22 this year. Most of them with Trish, Abbie and Jack. Next year, we'll be getting Abbie a Colorado 5th Grade Free Ski Pass and trying to hit all the ski resorts in the state. Below are some of my favorite pictures from this year's season - can't wait for next year!

The Bus Project
The last time I wrote about The Bus, it was in October. Since then, its rear suspension and wheels/times have been installed. In February, I bought a brand-new 911 racing engine and it's been installed as well.

There's still quite a bit of suspension, drivetrain and steering work to do, but it's in good hands. Last week, I removed it from Motorworks Restorations and I've started finishing it myself. I don't have welding skills and equipment, so I'm contracting that out, as I will most of the finishing touches. I'm also thinking of writing a letter to one of those Body Shop shows on TV and seeing if I can get them to finish it.

New Gig
If you've seen my LinkedIn Profile lately, you'll know I was looking for a new gig. I found one in mid-May and started consulting at Travelport in June. It's a nice 11-mile bike ride (uphill on the way there, downhill coming home) that I've thoroughly enjoyed. Takes me about an hour each way and is much better than sitting in traffic for 45 minutes. The project is interesting and fun to work on, and it ends in a couple weeks.

The Wedding and Honeymoon
In July, we're heading up to The Cabin in Montana to vacation and get ready for our wedding. We'll be enjoying the outdoors (rafting, biking, fishing), visiting with my folks and getting ready for the big day. After that, we'll be heading on a whirlwind honeymoon that takes us from Ireland to Italy to Thailand to Fiji. We're very much looking forward to the whole adventure.

And with that, I must go. It's Craft Cruisers night and there's beer to drink.