Raible Designs

Farewell to the 2022-2023 Ski Season

You can tell your Spring is a whirlwind when you don't have time to write your end-of-ski-season post until July!

My ski season started way back in October, on Halloween at A-Basin, to be precise. It ended with an Okta + Gradle Developer Ski Day on April 13th. I'm proud to say I achieved 39 days of skiing, with 15 being alpine skiing and the rest being cross-country skiing. A lot of the cross-country skiing was done in our backyard, on the neighborhood bridal trails. We got lucky this year because it snowed in early January and stuck around until February. That's rare in our neck of the woods.

The highlight of the ski season was celebrating Trish's 50th birthday at A-Basin. We rented a few spots on the beach, invited a bunch of friends, and had a blast.

The onesies were Trish's idea. 😅 You can buy your own from Tipsy Elves.

The Angular Mini-Book 1.0 is now available!

I'm pleased to announce that the Angular Mini-Book has been released! You can download it in PDF and EPUB formats from InfoQ.

About this book

The Angular Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with Angular. You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, and authentication. Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy.

This initial edition (v1.0) uses Angular 12 and Spring Boot 2.5. I do plan on updating it for Angular 13 and Spring Boot 2.6. If you have any tips for upgrading, please let me know!

Purpose of the book

I think building web and mobile applications with Angular, Bootstrap, and Spring Boot is a great experience. I'd like to encourage more developers to try it.

Thanks!

I'm incredibly grateful to Trish, Abbie, and Jack. They put up with my late nights and extended screen time while I worked on this book.

Dell UltraSharp U3818DW 38" Curved Monitor Review

A little over a month ago, I purchased a Dell UltraSharp U3818DW 38" curved monitor. Previously, I had two 27" monitors ‐ an Apple Thunderbolt Display and an Asus 4K. I wanted to return to a single monitor and asked Twitter for advice. Based on recommendations I received, I purchased a Dell UltraSharp U3818DW 38" from B&H on Sunday, March 29. It arrived two days later.

Happy Birthday Abbie!

Abbie turns 14 today and she's celebrating in style. Her brave parents allowed her to have a slumber with all her friends. There's 11 teenage girls in our basement right now, screaming, giggling and making lots of loud noises.

I'm really proud of the young woman Abbie has become. She's a straight-A student and loves horseback riding and sleeping.

Trish and she bought a new horse a few weeks ago. His name is Tucker and they traveled to New Mexico to find him. He's a thoroughbred paint, with hunter jumper skills. We'd love to keep at the Raible Ranch, but we want to see what the winters are like first. For now, he's at Friends of Horses, which has an indoor arena. Next year, the girls plan to compete and hopefully bring home lots of trophies!

Happy 14th Birthday Abbie!

Getting Started + Testing with Angular CLI and Angular 2 (RC5)

I started creating Angular 2 applications when it was in beta (back in March). To keep up with Angular 2's changes, I wrote a tutorial about developing with RC1 in June. Earlier this month, RC5 was released and many things changed once again. I think Scott Davis sums it up nicely in a tweet.

To keep up with the rapid pace of change in Angular 2, I decided to write another tutorial, this time using Angular CLI. The biggest change I found since writing the last tutorial is testing infrastructure changes. Since Angular's Testing documentation hasn't been updated recently, hopefully this tutorial will help.

Testing Angular 2.0 RC1 Applications

As mentioned on Friday, there's been quite a bit that's changed with Angular 2 between its Beta 9 and RC 1 releases. This article is an update to the Testing Angular 2 Applications I wrote in March. That tutorial was based on Angular 2.0 Beta 9. Rather than simply updating that tutorial and blog post for 2.0 RC1, I decided to create a new version for posterity's sake. The 2.0 Beta 9 version will remain on my blog and I've tagged the source on GitHub.

If you've already read the first version of Testing Angular 2 Applications, checkout the diff of the Asciidoctor version to see what's changed.

git clone https://github.com/mraible/angular2-tutorial.git
cd angular2-tutorial
git checkout testing-start
npm install

Getting Started with Angular 2.0 RC1

A few months ago, I wrote a tutorial on Getting Started with Angular 2. That tutorial was based on Angular 2.0.0 Beta 9. Rather than simply updating that tutorial and blog post for 2.0.0 RC1, I decided to create a new version for posterity's sake. The 2.0 Beta 9 version will remain on my blog and I've tagged the source on GitHub. This is an updated version of Getting Started with Angular 2, complete with the largely undocumented component router, and lazy-loaded components.

If you'd just like to see what's changed since the last release of this tutorial, you can view the pull request on GitHub. Note that I did sync my angular2-tutorial project with angular2-seed. This made it fairly easy to upgrade, believe it or not. My upgrade notes are in a gist. The best diff to read to see what changed is likely the diff of this tutorial.

git clone https://github.com/mgechev/angular2-seed.git angular2-tutorial
cd angular2-tutorial

Testing Angular 2 Applications

Click here to see an updated version of this tutorial that's been upgraded for Angular 2.0 RC1.

This article is the second in a series about learning Angular 2. It describes how to test a simple Angular 2 application. In a previous article, Getting Started with Angular 2, I showed how to develop a simple search and edit feature. In this tutorial, I did my best to keep the tests similar to last year's Testing AngularJS Applications so you can compare the code between AngularJS and Angular 2.

git clone https://github.com/mraible/angular2-tutorial.git
cd angular2-tutorial
npm install

Getting Started with Angular 2

Click here to see an updated version of this tutorial that's been upgraded for Angular 2.0 RC1.

I was hired by one of my current clients in November to help them develop a project management application with AngularJS. I'm proud to say we've built the application, it looks great, and it's scheduled to be released next month. The team had lots of experience with ExtJS, but was new to AngularJS. While using AngularJS worked, they're keen on moving to Angular 2 shortly after it's released.

To help them learn Angular 2, I decided to write a couple tutorials similar to the AngularJS tutorials I wrote last year. In this tutorial, I did my best to keep the functionality and features similar to Getting Started with AngularJS so you can compare the code between the two.

Create your project

Clone the angular2-seed repository using git:

git clone https://github.com/mgechev/angular2-seed.git angular2-tutorial
cd angular2-tutorial

How to Implement a Smart Chunking Bootstrap Carousel with AngularJS

I've been helping a client develop a project management application for the last several months. One of the features I implemented uses UI Bootstrap's carousel directive to display a list of project templates to choose from when creating a new project. Rather than displaying one at a time, we wanted to display as many as the user's screen would allow. That is, if they were on a large monitor, we wanted to display five templates, a medium size monitor would display three and so on. This is a story of how I implemented a smart chunking carousel.