AngularJS Web Application Development Blueprints

Table of Contents

AngularJS Web Application Development Blueprints

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

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Preface

About JavaScript MVC frameworks

How AngularJS was born

The idea behind this book

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Software versions

Copying the code files

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Introduction to AngularJS and the Single Page Application

Delving into Single Page Apps

Anatomy of a simple AngularJS app

Models and views

Building an Address Book App

Understanding the scope in AngularJS

Styling the app

Sorting the contacts alphabetically

Adding contacts to the Address Book

The ng-show and ng-hide directives

Summary

2. Setting Up Your Rig

Setting up Node.js

Creating a simple Node.js web server with ExpressJS

Setting up Grunt

Installing Grunt-cli

Creating the package.json file

Creating your Grunt tasks

Grunt tasks to merge and concatenate files

Running shell commands via Grunt

Yeoman – the workflow tool

Installing Yeoman

Running your app

Unit testing with Karma

Using Protractor for End-to-End tests

Installing Selenium Server

Understanding the example_spec.js file

Understanding the conf.js file

Writing your own Protractor test cases

Summary

3. Rapid Prototyping with AngularJS

Understanding the application that we will Prototype

Introducing Grid Layouts and Bootstrap

Understanding the grid system

Introducing Angular UI

UI-Utils

UI-Modules

UI-Bootstrap

NG-Grid

UI-Router

IDE Plugins

Prototyping the Healthy Living website

Adding the ui.bootstrap dependency

Creating the navigation bar

Adding the carousel

Tweaking the hero unit

Adding the three content blocks

Creating a new view

Understanding routes

Building the articles view

Accordions using Angular Bootstrap

Building the image gallery

Gallery view using Bootstrap Thumbnail

Adding the star rating

Building data grids using NG-Grid

Adding the NG-Grid component

Grouping data in NG-Grid

Excel-style editing in NG-Grid

Creating a modal window to add subscribers

Real-time form validations

Summary

4. Using REST Web Services in Your AngularJS App

Understanding the response from a REST API

Testing a RESTful web service

Jump starting your app development with Angular Seed

Files and folders in Angular Seed

Adding Bootstrap libraries

Starting your Node web server

Mark-up our Layout

Creating the routes

Understanding AngularJS services

Writing your first factory service

Dependency Injection

Coding the partial

Calling the REST web service using $http

Using promise for asynchronous calls

Displaying data from the JSON response

Unit testing our application

Mocking $http during Unit testing

Creating a Pinterest style layout

Adding actions to the buttons

Summary

5. Facebook Friends' Birthday Reminder App

Understanding the Facebook SDK

The Social Graph

The Graph API

The Graph API Explorer

Creating your Facebook app

Setting up our project

Running your application

Delving into AngularJS directives

What is a directive?

Importance of naming conventions for directives

The anatomy of a directive

Writing our first directive

Adding a Facebook login

Adding the fb-root div element

Loading the Facebook SDK

Understanding $watch and $digest

When to use $apply

Getting the user's friend list

Getting your friends' profile pictures and birthdays

Requesting additional permission with FB.login

Understanding isolated scope

Adding some CSS styles

Changing the routes

Adding in the logout link

Writing automated tests

Writing Unit tests with Karma

Writing End-to-End tests using Protractor

Summary

6. Building an Expense Manager Mobile App

Understanding HTML5 Web Storage

localStorage

sessionStorage

Building the Expense Manager App

Building the Add Expense form

What is $rootScope?

Understanding the .run block

Creating a value service to store CategoryList

Validating the Add Expense form

Using localStorage to save data

Building a bar chart directive based on D3

Summarizing the expenses by categories

Creating our bar chart directive

Making the app responsive

Adding the CSS media query

Scaling the D3 chart based on window size

Adding touch events

Enabling swipe gestures using ngTouch

Adding page transitions using ngAnimate

Loading the ngAnimate module

Adding CSS3 transitions

Making the app feel like a native app

Adding touch icons

Running the app in fullscreen mode

Adding additional features

Summary

7. Building a CMS on the MEAN Stack

Why the MEAN stack?

Getting started with the MEAN stack

Setting up MongoDB

Setting up ExpressJS and MongooseJS

Building the server-side app

Creating the Mongoose schemas

Creating CRUD routes

Adding a new entry to the collection

Updating a collection

Deleting a collection item

Displaying a single record

Securing your admin section

Using bcrypt to encrypt passwords

Adding a new admin user

Creating the route for authenticating login

Creating the logout route

Writing the sessionCheck middleware

Integrating AngularJS with an ExpressJS project

Generating SEO-friendly URLs using HTML5 mode

Building the admin section for CRUD operations

Creating the routes for the admin section

Building the factory services

Building the controllers for the admin section

Setting up the admin page layout

Building the listing view for the admin section

Setting up authentication in AngularJS

Creating our login page

Building a custom module for global notification

Building and initializing the message.flash module

Building the message.flash factory service

Setting up $broadcasts

Building the directive for the message.flash module

Setting a flash message

Creating our Add-Edit page controller

Creating our Add-Edit view

Writing a custom filter to autogenerate the URL field

Adding the WYSIWYG editor

Setting up an Interceptor to detect responses

Building the frontend of our CMS

Building our navigation bar directive

Building the admin-login directive

Displaying the content of a page

Setting the default home page

Summary

8. Scalable Architecture for Deployments on AWS

Understanding the various services in Amazon AWS

Delving into AWS deployment architectures

The EC2 server-based architecture

The Server-less Architecture

Deploying our app in a Server-less Architecture on AWS

Mapping a domain to S3

Mapping the S3 bucket to a CloudFront distribution

Getting your app ready for production deployment

Improving the page-load time of your app

Setting Expires headers

Performance

Summary

9. Building an E-Commerce Store

Backend as a Service

Building a BaaS platform on AWS

Setting up an S3 Bucket with public read access

Setting up the CORS policy on your S3 bucket

Creating our DynamoDB tables

Creating the Identity and Access Management (IAM) role

Creating our e-commerce app

Building nested views using UI-Router

Mapping states to URL, views, and controllers

Prototyping our application

Setting up our index.html file

Creating the controllers

Creating the product partials

Adding animations to the view transitions

Adding in the CSS transition effects

Creating our application-level controller

Adding a Facebook login

Integrating AWS JS SDK with our application

Creating the AWS service provider

Building our Add Products page

Saving data in DynamoDB tables

Creating the view for the add product form

Building the controller for the add products view

Uploading images to S3

Fetching the products lists for a category

Using resolves to preload data

Creating our product details page

Adding products to cart

The checkout page

Saving the orders

Summary

A. AngularJS Resources

Official resources

Recommended AngularJS modules

Boiler plates

Learning resources

Good friends with AngularJS (third-party tools and services)

Core team members and knowledgeable people to follow

Index

AngularJS Web Application Development Blueprints

AngularJS Web Application Development Blueprints

Copyright © 2014 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: August 2014

Production reference: 1180814

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN 978-1-78328-561-7

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Cover image by Faiz Fattohi (<faizfattohi@gmail.com>)

Credits

Author

Vinci Rufus

Reviewers

Jeff Cunningham

Ashutosh Das

AJ Kerrigan

Ciro Nunes

Yacine Rezgui

Commissioning Editor

Akram Hussain

Acquisition Editor

Richard Harvey

Content Development Editor

Vaibhav Pawar

Technical Editors

Shashank Desai

Menza Mathew

Copy Editors

Karuna Narayanan

Alfida Paiva

Laxmi Subramanian

Project Coordinators

Binny K. Babu

Kranti Berde

Proofreaders

Bridget Braund

Paul Hindle

Lucy Rowland

Indexers

Hemangini Bari

Mariammal Chettiyar

Rekha Nair

Priya Subramani

Graphics

Valentina D'silva

Production Coordinator

Aparna Bhagat

Cover Work

Aparna Bhagat

About the Author

Vinci Rufus has been working with frontend technologies for close to 14 years now. He started his career building games with Flash ActionScript and later moved on to JavaScript and HTML5. During his spare time, he enjoys conducting workshops and training people.

For a living, he mentors, guides, and helps grow the technology team at Razorfish Neev, primarily in the area of commerce, usability, and emerging technologies.

A sincere thanks to the awesome team at Razorfish Neev. I've learned so much working with you all.

My deepest regards to the technical reviewers, Jeff Cunningham, Ashutosh Das, AJ Kerrigan, Ciro Nunes, and Yacine Rezgui, and also to the content development editor, Vaibhav Pawar, whose insights and feedback greatly helped in adding the finishing touches for this book.

A big thank you to my family; my dad, Rufus, who learned computers only so that he could teach me; my mom, Anne, who has always encouraged me to take up challenges every time I thought it wasn't possible; my awesome kids, Shannon and Jaden, who sacrificed a lot of their play time so that I could write this book; my wife, Raina, for all the support that was instrumental in this book reaching its completion; and finally, my sister, Blaisy, who was always there to give feedback and critique my work, and with whom I could brainstorm and discuss ideas.

About the Reviewers

Jeff Cunningham is a mobile app developer at Comdata in Nashville, TN. After 15 years of working in the field of Java web development, he now enjoys the challenges of frontend and mobile development. He also reviewed the book, AngularJS Directives, Packt Publishing, and maintains the popular repo named AngularJS-Learning on GitHub (https://github.com/jmcunningham/AngularJS-Learning).

Ashutosh Das, who hails from Bangladesh, works mainly as a backend developer and his experience includes working with Django, Node.js, Laravel, and so on. He also likes to work with AngularJS. He spends his spare time writing for GitHub. He also works as a freelancer and is a part-time job holder. He is currently in the process of reviewing the book, AngularJS UI Development, Packt Publishing.

AJ Kerrigan is a systems analyst with a small IT department in New Jersey. His technical duties and interests include server and database administration, command-line scripting, and web development.

AngularJS Web Application Development Blueprints, Packt Publishing, represents AJ's first experience as a technical reviewer.

I would like to thank my wife, daughter, and dog for their love, support, and endless supply of hugs. Thanks to my father as well, who provided me with my first exposure to programming (BASIC on the family TI-99/4a computer). He has been a consistent source of encouragement and guidance.

Ciro Nunes is a 22-year old frontend engineer, test-first evangelist, and specialist in large-scale architectures for heavy client-side applications. At such a young age, he has been responsible for the development of the biggest e-commerce websites from Latin America. He's also the organizer of the AngularJS SP Meetup which has more than 400 members.

Nowadays, he's working on applications for the financial market that pushes the boundaries of AngularJS.

I want to thank my family and friends for their patience, with me being so absent lately. I promise that I'm going to walk more with the dog and spend more time with you whom I love.

Yacine Rezgui is a French-Tunisian web developer. He started web developing at the age of 12, and since then, has made his passion his job. He's specialized in web development and strongly believes that it is the best cross-platform environment. He's currently the organizer of the London Phonegap Meetup.

He worked in different companies such as Médiamétrie eStat, Tequila Rapido, and GovernorHub as a freelancer.

I would like to thank my friends, James Nocentini, James Sharp, Cédric Ferretti, and Xavier Kress for supporting me on my work, my family for all their encouragement, and Xuxu for helping me to focus.

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Preface

The most annoying part of using any website or web application is the time we wait for pages to load. Sure, everybody is working on making the Web fast, but those 2-3 seconds that it takes for a round trip to the server does not stop you from opening multiple tabs and often forgetting which tab you originally were on.

The rapid popularity of JavaScript frameworks and technologies such as AJAX clearly show the desperate need to save those 1 or 2, second-round trips to the server, and provide the users with a more desktop-like user experience.

About JavaScript MVC frameworks

These JavaScript frameworks aren't some new revolutionary technology or a new discovery; they are all still using the same old faithful JavaScript. These JavaScript frameworks merely provide a layer of abstraction (if I may) or a more Model-View-Controller-like architecture, so that we can be more productive while building apps and don't really have to worry about mundane things.

The credit for the rising popularity of these JavaScript frameworks would go to this surge of JavaScript-based highly interactive and rich Internet applications that nowadays do so much more than just displaying data received from a backend server. All of this is possible thanks to the modern day browser and their JavaScript engines that have become faster and powerful.

There has nearly been an explosion of these JavaScript MVC frameworks, and every other day, we see a new framework being launched. While most people consider Backbone.js or SproutCore to be one of the first JavaScript frameworks, I would say Ext JS by Sencha has been among the first JavaScript frameworks and one that is still being extensively used in the corporate world mainly to build finance apps. While Backbone.js and SproutCore were launched in 2010, Version 2.0 of Ext JS was launched towards the end of 2007.

AngularJS too was launched somewhere in 2010. Around the same time, other JavaScript frameworks were sprouting up. However, it is probably the fastest growing framework in terms of user adoption, mainly due to the wow factor and also the backing from the big G.

Each framework has its own pros and cons, and ideally the choice of the framework would depend on the nature of your project.

Note

http://www.todomvc.com/ is a very nice site to understand and compare the functioning of these JavaScript frameworks.

AngularJS is currently the most popular JavaScript MVC framework. Some of the reasons for this would be as follows:

It's among the simplest to learn

It follows some of the best software-engineering concepts, and is ideal to build large, scalable apps

It has a robust testing framework to run Unit tests and End-to-End tests, thus making it easy to write and run automated test cases

It also allows for teams to work in parallel on a single application without stepping over each other's work

It has the fastest growing community of adaptors, and the AngularJS Google Groups and IRC chats are a great place to interact with others

How AngularJS was born

AngularJS started as an internal Google project by Misko Hevery, sometime in 2009. As the story goes, Misko's team was working on a project called Google Feedback; even after six months of development and about 17,000 lines of code, they were still unhappy with the pace of development and the inability to write automated tests. That's when Misko decided to rewrite that. It took him about 3 weeks and he managed to write the whole thing in just about 1,500 lines of code.

That's when AngularJS got some serious attention internally at Google, and a team was put together to help further develop it. Around 2010, Google decided to declare it as open source under the MIT license.

The idea behind this book

The idea behind writing this book is to showcase the different types of applications that can be built on AngularJS. Besides explaining AngularJS and how to write modular and testable code, there is a fair amount of emphasis on making those apps look beautiful. So, be ready for some CSS stuff and design-related discussions.

I've tried to cover a variety of applications ranging from a simple address book, an HTML5 mobile app, an e-commerce store, a CMS framework, and also ideas on how to deploy apps on Amazon AWS.

What this book covers

This book is broken down into nine chapters.

Chapter 1, Introduction to AngularJS and the Single Page Application, talks about the concept of a Single Page App and how they are different from the regular web apps. We'll also learn about the basics of AngularJS by building a simple Address Book App.

Chapter 2, Setting Up Your Rig, talks about how having the right set of tools can be a huge productivity booster. It also makes you feel like a pro when building your AngularJS app. This chapter will talk about some of the tools such as Node.js, ExpressJS, Grunt, Yeoman, and Karma.

Chapter 3, Rapid Prototyping with AngularJS, talks about the ease with which one can create clickable prototypes to get a feel of how an application would look and feel before working on any backend code.

Chapter 4, Using REST Web Services in Your AngularJS App, will show you how to consume data from third-party REST web services using factories and the $http service.

Chapter 5, Facebook Friends' Birthday Reminder App, will explain directives and how we can create our Facebook login directive. We will also set up some automated tests to ensure everything is working fine.

Chapter 6, Building an Expense Manager Mobile App, will walk you through the process of building a responsive and touch-friendly mobile app using ngAnimate and HTML5 features such as localStorage.

Chapter 7, Building a CMS on the MEAN Stack, talks about how to set up an entire backend and frontend system and how AngularJS interacts with a node server and MongoDB database. We will also look at session management and interceptors.

Chapter 8, Scalable Architecture for Deployments on AWS, will teach you about AWS and its various services, and how we can deploy our app in a Server-less Architecture that can inherently scale.

Chapter 9, Building an E-Commerce Store, will show you how to directly read and write data from AWS's DynamoDB database, and upload images to S3 directly from our JavaScript app.

Appendix, AngularJS Resources. Well, you know what to expect here.

What you need for this book

You obviously don't need to read the entire book before you can start working on your first AngularJS project. I'm a firm believer of learning things the practical way, and that's why from the very first chapter, you will find yourself firing up your IDE/Text editor, and writing code and testing it on your browser.

While you will learn a couple of new features of AngularJS in each of the chapters, each chapter is still self-contained, and you can comfortably jump to any of the chapters that interest you or that you need to refer to for your project.

However, if you are just starting off with AngularJS, then I strongly recommend that you read through the first three chapters before you start jumping.

Software versions

The current stable version of AngularJS while writing this book is 1.2, and unless specified, we will be using the stable version of