For more than 12 years, I have been developing all kinds of web applications, and along the way, I have had the opportunity to experience the vast majority of frameworks on the Java platform. In 2008, I moved from an architecture highly based on backend web frameworks such as Struts and JSF to experience new challenges at the frontend. I think the main goal was to stop creating those old-school and hard-to-use web applications, investing on interactivity and usability.
At that time, I adopted the Google Web Toolkit, also known as GWT, building some web applications for almost 2 years. The results were pretty amazing in terms of user experience; however, I felt very upset about low productivity and also the amount of code that I had to write every day.
After that, in 2010, I decided to change drastically, adopting a much simpler approach by using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to write the frontend code. The experience was fantastic, which provided me with a very fast feedback cycle. The only problem was the lack of a layered architecture, which was unable to provide a clear separation of concerns while working with the JavaScript language. Also, I was missing things such as a strong dependency injection mechanism that would allow me to create reusable and testable components.
While looking for a solution, a very experienced JavaScript developer and also a great friend of mine, Rafael Nami, introduced me to AngularJS. In the following weeks, I started to read everything about it and also writing some code. After a few weeks, I was thrilled because it had never been so easy to create amazing web applications with so little code!
Only 2 months later, I launched my first web application based entirely on AngularJS, and honestly, I cannot imagine writing this same application using another kind of technology in this short period of time. I was so excited about it that I wrote an article on using AngularJS with Spring MVC and Hibernate for a magazine called Java Magazine. After that, I created an AngularJS training program that already has more than 200 developers who enrolled last year.
This book, AngularJS Essentials, is the result of that experience. This is a very practical guide, filled with many step-by-step examples that will lead you through the best practices of this amazing framework.
We are going to start, after a brief introduction, by learning how to create reusable components with directives. Then, we will take a look at many data handling techniques, discovering a complete set of technologies that are capable to accomplish any challenge related to present, transform, and validate data on the user's interface.
After that, we will explore the secrets of the dependency injection mechanism and also learn how to create services in order to improve the application's design. Also, we are going to discover the best way to deal with the scope and how to break up the application into separate modules, giving rise to reusable and interchangeable libraries.
Finally, we are going to learn how to test each component of the framework using Jasmine and also how to automate the workflow, creating an optimized distribution package with Grunt.
Rodrigo Branas
Software Architect, Author and International Speaker
Agile Code
Chapter 1, Getting Started with AngularJS, introduces the framework and its architectural model. After that, we will start coding our first application and also understand how to organize our project.
Chapter 2, Creating Reusable Components with Directives, explains how the directives are one of the most important features of the framework. With them, we will understand how to extend the HTML language vocabulary, creating new behaviors and reusable components.
Chapter 3, Data Handling, explains how the framework provides a complete set of technologies to fulfill any requirement about presenting, transforming, synchronizing, and validating data on the user's interface. We will go through all of these technologies in order to improve the user experience with our applications.
Chapter 4, Dependency Injection and Services, explains how we are going to create reusable and decoupled components by implementing services and using the dependency injection mechanism.
Chapter 5, Scope, discusses how scope is one of the main concepts of the framework. In this chapter, we will discover the best practices to deal with scope.
Chapter 6, Modules, briefs us on how the framework is strongly based on the modules. In this chapter, we will understand how to break up our application into modules.
Chapter 7, Unit Testing, shows how we will dive deeply into testing techniques. We are going to understand how to test each framework component using Jasmine.
Chapter 8, Automating the Workflow, discusses how we will create an optimized distribution package for our application using Grunt and its plugins. Also, we will discover how to manage our dependencies with Bower.
To implement the code in this book, you will need to use your favorite development interface and a web browser. I would recommend sublime text, but you may use Aptana (which is based on Eclipse), WebStorm, or any other IDE.
AngularJS is compatible with the most browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Feel free to choose the one you are used to.
If you have a passion for web development and are looking for a framework that could provide a reusable, maintainable, and modular way to create applications, and at the same time, help increase your productivity and satisfaction, this is the book for you.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The $http service wraps the low-level interaction with the XMLHttpRequest object, providing an easy way to perform AJAX calls without headaches."
A block of code is set as follows:
$http.get("/cars")
.success(function(data, status, headers, config) {
$scope.car = data;
})
.error(function(data, status, headers, config) {
console.log(data);
});When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
$http.get("/cars")
.success(function(data, status, headers, config) {
$scope.car = data;
})
.error(function(data, status, headers, config) {
console.log(data);
});Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
bower install angular
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "What happens when we change the plate and click on the Show Plate button?".
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