Raible Designs

Life as an Open Source Developer

It's been a little over a month since I started my new gig at Stormpath. I gotta say, life is great as an open source developer! Yes, I did start working for them as a consultant in April, so it's not a huge change for me. However, I only recently realized I haven't written a single line of proprietary code the entire time. My GitHub contributions look pretty good this year. They're nothing like @mojavelinux, or @dsyer, but I'll get there.

It's also been a bit more stress than I'm used to. I think this comes from a couple things: 1) turning my hobby into my job and 2) I've set a lot of high expectations for myself. As a developer evangelist, I get to create my own job. That means I can speak at the conferences I want to, write the code I want to, create the blog posts I want to, and everything else in between.

At the end of September, I finished updating the JHipster Mini-Book for JHipster 3.x. It's gone through tech editing and it's being copy-edited right now. I hope to release it within a week.

In early October, I said I'd commit to writing one blog post per week, develop a JHipster module for Stormpath, and help get their Angular 2 support good enough for an alpha release. I'm happy to report I've been able to accomplish most of these and I hope to show off our Angular 2 support soon.

I then channeled my efforts into integrating Stormpath's Java SDK with their AngularJS directives. You can read about how I did that in Get Started with AngularJS, Spring Boot, and Stormpath. Unlike my previous AngularJS tutorial, this one connects to a backend and shows how to communicate with Spring Boot cross-domain.

If you like to read code more than words, you can look at the example project's commits on GitHub.

1. Create an AngularJS UI: search and edit features
2. Create a Spring Boot app with Stormpath: app from start.stormpath.io
3. Develop an API to CRUD people with Spring Data REST: /api/people
4. Integrate AngularJS and Spring Boot apps: cross-domain
5. Integrate Stormpath into AngularJS for login, registration and forgot password: Stormpath Angular SDK

Last week, I released a JHipster module that integrates Stormpath. This exercise was good because I was able to identify some gaps in Stormpath's SDKs and fix them. Getting something to work made me feel good; having the ability to improve the developer experience was even better! Of course, I blogged about what I learned.

This week, I edited and code reviewed some posts from Karl Penzhorn on React with Spring Boot and using webpack with React. I also got to bang my head against the wall writing Angular 2 tests. If you're writing a module for Angular 2, generator-angular2-module provides a nice starting point.

Last, but certainly not least, I'll be speaking at a few events about Microservices, JHipster, Angular 2 and Stormpath in the near feature.

• Rocky Mountain Software Symposium, November 19
• The Rich Web Experience, December 9
• A joint talk at Denver JUG with the infamous Josh Long, December 14

If you have any questions about developer evangelism, the technologies I mentioned in this post, or Stormpath, please let me know. Otherwise, I hope to see you on the road soon!

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

Devoxx France 2016: Springtime in Paris

I had the good fortune to visit Paris last week for Devoxx France. When traveling to conferences in exotic locations, I like to bring a travel partner. This time, I asked my daughter, Abbie, to join me. She gladly accepted. Springtime in Paris can be a beautiful event. The grass is green, the flowers are blooming and the sun's rays blanket the city.

We arrived in Paris on Tuesday, April 19 and quickly found our way to our hotel. Its location was ideal: across the street from Le Palais des Congrès de Paris convention center and mall. Since the conference was at the convention center, it made logistics for my talks very convenient. We grabbed a quick bite after settling in, then took a 15-minute stroll to the Arc de Triomphe.

That evening, we joined Ippon developers and friends at a special event for Java Hipsters. Their rooftop location had great views, cold "Java" beer and I met a lot of enthusiastic developers. I especially enjoyed talking with the original Java Hipster and founder of JHipster, Julien Dubois.

The sunset over Paris provided a splendid backdrop for the festivities.

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.

Angular Summit 2015

I was in Boston this week, speaking and attending the very first Angular Summit. I had the privilege of delivering the opening keynote on Monday. I spoke about the Art of Angular and used a slide deck similar to last time. I did update the presentation to show the astronomical growth of AngularJS in terms of candidate skills (on LinkedIn) and job opportunities (on Dice.com)¹.

I mentioned the recently announced good news for Angular 2:

• We're enabling mixing of Angular 1 and Angular 2 in the same application.
• You can mix Angular 1 and Angular 2 components in the same view.
• Angular 1 and Angular 2 can inject services across frameworks.
• Data binding works across frameworks.

In related news, Craig Doremus recently posted a state-geo-angular project that shows how you can develop an Angular 1.x application that will be easy to upgrade to Angular 2.x. Thanks Craig!

After my keynote, I attended Pratik Patel's session on High Performance JavaScript Web Apps. Pratik pointed out mobitest.akamai.com for testing an app's performance and seeing its blocking resources. He also mentioned speedgun.io (currently unavailable) for capturing performance numbers as part of a continuous integration process. Finally, he recommended Addy Somani's JavaScript Memory Management Masterclass.

My second presentation was about JHipster. Near the end of the presentation, I mentioned that I hope to finish the JHipster Book this month. Writing presentations for SpringOne 2GX and the Angular Summit occupied a lot of my free time in September. Now that it's October, I'll be dedicating my free time to finishing the book. In fact, I think I can finish the rough draft this week!

For the last session of the day, I attended John Lindquist's session on Angular 2 Components. John showed us how everything is a component in Angular 2. He also said "now is the time to learn ES6" and built an Angular 2 ToDo App using ES6 and a bit of TypeScript. You might recognize John's name; he's the founder of egghead.io, an excellent site for learning Angular with bite-sized videos.

Tuesday morning started with a Angular 2.0 keynote from Peter Pavlovich. I really enjoyed this session and received lots of good tips about getting ready for Angular 2. The tweet below from Ksenia Dmitrieva shows his advice.

My biggest takeaway was to start following John Papa's Angular Style Guide ASAP.

The first session I attended on Tuesday was Judd Flamm's Google Material Design & Angular. I'm using Material Design for Bootstrap on a side project, so I was interested in learning more about its inspiration. We learned that Google Design has everything you need to know about why Material Design exists. We also learned about Angular Material and spent most of the session looking at its components. Judd recommended Angular Material-Start for those looking to get started quickly with both frameworks. Judd was a very entertaining speaker; I highly recommend you attend one of his talks if you get the opportunity.

After being dazzled by Peter's knowledge of Angular 2 in Tuesday's keynote, I attended two more of his talks: one on Meteor and another on Aurelia. I've known about Meteor for a while, but have become more intrigued by it lately with its 1.2 release and Angular support. Meteor's command line tools that auto-inject CSS and JS demoed very well, as did it's installable features like a LESS support and Facebook authentication.

After hearing all the good things about Angular 2 from Peter, it was interesting to hear him downplay it in his Aurelia talk later that day. When he started showing code, it was pretty obvious that Aurelia is doing a great job of simplifying JavaScript MVC syntax for developers. You can develop components with almost half the code that Angular 2 requires, and it uses ES6, jspm and SystemJS. If you're developing JavaScript, learning these tools will help prepare you for the future. It's cool that Aurelia encourages learning things you should learn anyway.

Aurelia and Angular 2 are both still in Alpha, so I'm not sure it makes sense to use them on a project this year. However, I do think it's important to track them both. I especially think it's interesting that the founder of Aurelia, Rob Eisenberg, left the Angular Team in November 2014 and announced Aurelia in January 2015 (Hacker News thread). Peter mentioned several times that Aurelia wants to help developers write apps, while AngularJS is more tied to helping Google write apps.

There were around 400 people at Angular Summit, which I think is pretty good for a first-run conference. As with most No Fluff Just Stuff shows, it ran smoothly, had plenty of time between sessions and was filled with knowledgeable, entertaining speakers. It was fun doing my first keynote and I look forward to speaking again in November (at Devoxx) and December (at The Rich Web Experience).

1. I know Dice.com is probably not a great site, but it makes sense to use it since I've been tracking JavaScript MVC framework job stats on it since February 2014.

SpringOne 2GX 2015: My Presentations on Comparing Hot JavaScript Frameworks and NoXML

Last week, I had the pleasure of traveling to Washington, DC to speak at the annual SpringOne 2GX conference. I was pretty stressed for the last few weeks because I had to create two new presentations from scratch, and both had to be 90 minutes long. I was also hoping to finish the JHipster Book before the conference started. I was able to finish both presentations in the nick of time, but did not find the time to write the last chapter in the JHipster Book.

The first presentation was titled Comparing Hot JavaScript Frameworks: AngularJS, Ember.js and React.js. I started by revisiting the Comparing JVM Web Frameworks talk I did at vJUG last February. I explained how I think traditional web frameworks are no longer relevant in 2015, but I do believe server-side rendering is still very relevant. From there, I used Yevgeniy Brikman’s framework scorecard (from his Node.js vs. Play Framework presentation) to rank each framework by a number of different criteria. You can see the final results on slide 160. Since the scores were so close, I believe you could tweak some scores a bit (or add weights to the different criteria) and make any of the frameworks come out on top.

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

I started writing the second presentation a week before I had to deliver it. On Thursday, September 10th, I stayed up late, trying to figure out how to create a good presentation on NoXML and finish the last part of the JHipster Book. Then it came to me, I needed to parallelize and do them both at the same time. I decided to compare AppFuse (which is similar to a legacy Spring application with lots of XML) to JHipster (which hardly contains any XML).

I wrote a 10-page Google Doc on how I planned to do this, then went rafting and camping with my family for the weekend. I finished most of the presentation on Monday night, but then realized the presentation wouldn't be long enough to fill 90 minutes. So I hunkered down at midnight, created a new AppFuse application and removed a bunch of its XML. This took me until 3:30am, and I was able to accomplish the following tasks:

• Spring XML to Java
• Spring Security Configuration to Java
• web.xml to WebApplicationInitializer
• Spring MVC to Java
• Migrated to Spring Boot
• Maven to Groovy

I was pretty pumped when I completed my final goal: converting to Spring Boot and getting a test to pass. I made commits to an appfuse-noxml project on GitHub as I accomplished each step. You can see all the changes in the project's commit log. While I'd figured everything out, I still needed to complete the presentation. Luckily, I found time to do this the night before, the morning of, and in the final hour before I had to deliver the talk. You can imagine my relief when I was done delivering both talks.

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

While I didn't get to spend much time at the conference, I did have a lot of fun while I was there. I got to meet some new folks, reconnect with old friends, and enjoy beers and dinner with a smiling crew on Thursday night. The Broncos victory late that night was the icing on the cake.