Showing posts with label AngularJS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AngularJS. Show all posts

Monday, January 26, 2015

5 AngularJS Frameworks to Get Apps Up and Running Quickly

Now that you are well-versed in the basics, it is time to get started on building your own web application with AngularJS. AngularJS made building a Javascript-based app more intuitive using what’s called directives, which works hand-in-hand with your HTML markups.



If building a web application from the ground seems overwhelming to you, not to worry. Some very generous developers have adapted a few frontend frameworks to support AngularJS. Like a typical framework, they come with pre-built web components. These make using the framework the perfect tool for anyone who needs to get a web application up and running quick.


Here are 5 frameworks you can use to kick-start a web-based application with AngularJS.



1. AngularUI Bootstrap


AngularUI Bootstrap, as the name implies, is built on top one of the most popular front-end frameworks, Bootstrap. This framework contains a set of Bootstrap components such as Carousel, Alert, and Collapse along with some additions, like Rating and TimePicker.


All these components have been ported to use AngularJS directives (ng-repeat and ng-controller) and custom HTML elements. For example, rather than using a <div> to wrap the Carousel, you can use a more “meaningful” custom element, <carousel> and <slide>:



<carousel interval="slideInterval">
<slide ng-repeat="slide in slides" active="slide.active">
<img ng-src="slide.image">
</slide>
</carousel>

If you are a big fan of Bootstrap while also enjoy the power and the performance that AngularJS offered, this could be a perfect choice of framework.



2. Angular Foundation


Another popular framework that has also been ported to use AngularJS is Foundation, and it is simply named “Angular Foundation”.


Similarly, this framework has modified Foundation components to adopt AngularJS’s directive and custom HTML elements so you can now build your web application using more semantically named HTML element slike <top-bar>, <accordion>, and <pagination> , rather than the ambiguous <div>. Here is one example of how we add an Alert component with the <alert> element:



<div ng-controller="alertArea">
<alert ng-repeat="alert in alerts" type="alert.type" close="closeAlert($index)">alert.msg</alert>
</div>

If you like Foundation better than Bootstrap, then this is the framework to go with. Download Angular Foundation in this page, or stay up-to-date with the project development through the Github repo.



3. Ionic Framework


Ionic comes with a handful of solid building-blocks that makes developing mobile applications easy and fast. Each component in the Ionic framework is optimized for mobile experience, which is basically dependent on touch and gestures. These UI components are also made up of custom HTML elements. In deploying a tabbed navigation, for example, you would use the <ion-tabs>:



<ion-tabs class="tabs-default tabs-icon-only">
<ion-tab title="Home" icon-on="ion-ios-home" icon-off="ion-ios-home-outline">
</ion-tab>
<!-- The rest of the tabs go here -->
</ion-tabs>

To make it even easier and faster to build your application, you can use Ionic Creator which lets you build your app by drag-n-drop. So if performance and speed is important to you, Ionic is the best framework to go with.



4. Mobile Angular UI


Mobile Angular UI is a mobile UI framework which is an extension of the Bootstrap framework, aimed to build mobile applications. It uses most of Bootstrap 3 syntaxes with some added specific mobile components such as switches, overlays, sidebars and scrollable areas. It is only dependent on AngularJS and you can easily bring your current web app into mobile version by adding provided CSS to turn your content responsive and touch-enabled.


Download this framework here



5. UI Grid


UI Grid is the best way to work a grid or table with Angular. It has rich features to display simple, and also complex and large datasets on a grid. UI Grid is designed to execute complex features only when needed, thus keeping the core small. With UI Grid you can bind cells to complex properties/functions, run column sorting and filtering, edit data in place and more. To change styles of your data grid display, use Customizer.


Get the latest UI Grid from its homepage.




5 AngularJS Frameworks to Get Apps Up and Running Quickly

Saturday, January 24, 2015

7 Free eBooks To Learn AngularJS

So you’ve been following this Angular series (if you haven’t, start from the top here) and have come to a point where you are somewhat comfortable with playing with Angular or even building an app with it. For a more complete guideline when studying a project, we can always go to ebooks.



Ebooks give you a structural and organized way to learn a new topic, and it is no different with AngularJS. The best thing about ebooks these days however is that it can be heavily supplemented with practical exercises that can help you strengthen your grasp and understanding of certain aspects.


Let’s explore AngularJS with these 7 ebooks – some comprehensive, some fun, but all educational and won’t cause you a dime when read online.



1. AngularJS In 60 Minutes


If you have already gone through the video tutorial by Dan Wahlin, titled AngularJS-ish in 60 Minutes, AngularJS in 60 Minutes is a great help. The ebook carries the transcription of the video (done by Ian Smith) with relevant screenshots and the timestamp of when a topic comes up. If you prefer some text to go along with the video, then this is the ebook to get.



2. Recipes With AngularJS


Recipes With AngularJS is written by Frederik Dietz and is available to read online and as an ebook on Leanpub and Amazon. A cookbook of sorts, Recipes is a highly comprehensive book that deals with learning Anuglar in an organized and easy to understand way. Each section carries problems, solutions and discussions that will help guide you through Angular effectively. The code examples shown in the book are available in GitHub.



3. Practical AngularJS


Using real-life scenarios and examples, you will be introduced to building simple applications with AngularJS and Firebase in Eclipse IDE. You’ll also learn how to add control, wire up and create components, inside Eclipse. There are also sections on how to use KarmaJS to test your applications, how to use Firebase, miscellaneous tricks and troubelshooting you can use. Practical AngularJS by Dinis Cruz is available to read for free and to buy on Leanpub.



4. AngularJS Succinctly


Here is another AngularJS book written by Frederik Dietz. AngularJS Succinctly contains 10 chapters of problems, solutions and in-depth discussion to help you grasp the idea of Angular quickly. Learn the basics on using controllers, directives and filters all the way to integrated platforms like Ruby and Node. All code examples are hosted on Github; you can grab them there to practice on your own.



5. A Better Way to Learn AngularJS


A Better Way to Learn AngularJS is a 12-part course that provides insight into AngularJS. It carries plenty of learning materials from multiple sources, from official documentations, videos, other books and plenty of screencast by Egghead. Adopting a gradual easy to advanced way of building simple applications with Angular, this book contains plenty of checklists for you to keep track of what you have learned.



6. Henriquat.re (AngularJS for .NET Developers)


henriquat.re is a continuously updated ebook that contains learning materials about AngularJS from a .NET developer’s point of view. So far, there are 7 topics covered, including Modularizing AngularJS Applications and AngularJS and IE 8. You can follow the writers, Ingo Rammer and Christian Meyer for more updates on the book on Twitter.



7. AngularJS with Ruby


AngularJS with Ruby on Rails is a book by David Bryant Copeland which will help you build a Rails application with AngularJS – in less than 10,000 words. You will need to create a skeleton app, build, test the run features, and before you know it, you have an Angular app powered by Rails. The book contains an introduction, four chapters and a concluding chapter.




7 Free eBooks To Learn AngularJS

7 Free eBooks To Learn AngularJS

So you’ve been following this Angular series (if you haven’t, start from the top here) and have come to a point where you are somewhat comfortable with playing with Angular or even building an app with it. For a more complete guideline when studying a project, we can always go to ebooks.



Ebooks give you a structural and organized way to learn a new topic, and it is no different with AngularJS. The best thing about ebooks these days however is that it can be heavily supplemented with practical exercises that can help you strengthen your grasp and understanding of certain aspects.


Let’s explore AngularJS with these 7 ebooks – some comprehensive, some fun, but all educational and won’t cause you a dime when read online.



1. AngularJS In 60 Minutes


If you have already gone through the video tutorial by Dan Wahlin, titled AngularJS-ish in 60 Minutes, AngularJS in 60 Minutes is a great help. The ebook carries the transcription of the video (done by Ian Smith) with relevant screenshots and the timestamp of when a topic comes up. If you prefer some text to go along with the video, then this is the ebook to get.



2. Recipes With AngularJS


Recipes With AngularJS is written by Frederik Dietz and is available to read online and as an ebook on Leanpub and Amazon. A cookbook of sorts, Recipes is a highly comprehensive book that deals with learning Anuglar in an organized and easy to understand way. Each section carries problems, solutions and discussions that will help guide you through Angular effectively. The code examples shown in the book are available in GitHub.



3. Practical AngularJS


Using real-life scenarios and examples, you will be introduced to building simple applications with AngularJS and Firebase in Eclipse IDE. You’ll also learn how to add control, wire up and create components, inside Eclipse. There are also sections on how to use KarmaJS to test your applications, how to use Firebase, miscellaneous tricks and troubelshooting you can use. Practical AngularJS by Dinis Cruz is available to read for free and to buy on Leanpub.



4. AngularJS Succinctly


Here is another AngularJS book written by Frederik Dietz. AngularJS Succinctly contains 10 chapters of problems, solutions and in-depth discussion to help you grasp the idea of Angular quickly. Learn the basics on using controllers, directives and filters all the way to integrated platforms like Ruby and Node. All code examples are hosted on Github; you can grab them there to practice on your own.



5. A Better Way to Learn AngularJS


A Better Way to Learn AngularJS is a 12-part course that provides insight into AngularJS. It carries plenty of learning materials from multiple sources, from official documentations, videos, other books and plenty of screencast by Egghead. Adopting a gradual easy to advanced way of building simple applications with Angular, this book contains plenty of checklists for you to keep track of what you have learned.



6. Henriquat.re (AngularJS for .NET Developers)


henriquat.re is a continuously updated ebook that contains learning materials about AngularJS from a .NET developer’s point of view. So far, there are 7 topics covered, including Modularizing AngularJS Applications and AngularJS and IE 8. You can follow the writers, Ingo Rammer and Christian Meyer for more updates on the book on Twitter.



7. AngularJS with Ruby


AngularJS with Ruby on Rails is a book by David Bryant Copeland which will help you build a Rails application with AngularJS – in less than 10,000 words. You will need to create a skeleton app, build, test the run features, and before you know it, you have an Angular app powered by Rails. The book contains an introduction, four chapters and a concluding chapter.












7 Free eBooks To Learn AngularJS

Friday, January 23, 2015

5 AngularJS Frameworks to Get Apps Up and Running Quickly

Now that you are well-versed in the basics, it is time to get started on building your own web application with AngularJS. AngularJS made building a Javascript-based app more intuitive using what’s called directives, which works hand-in-hand with your HTML markups.



If building a web application from the ground seems overwhelming to you, not to worry. Some very generous developers have adapted a few frontend frameworks to support AngularJS. Like a typical framework, they come with pre-built web components. These make using the framework the perfect tool for anyone who needs to get a web application up and running quick.


Here are 5 frameworks you can use to kick-start a web-based application with AngularJS.



1. AngularUI Bootstrap


AngularUI Bootstrap, as the name implies, is built on top one of the most popular front-end frameworks, Bootstrap. This framework contains a set of Bootstrap components such as Carousel, Alert, and Collapse along with some additions, like Rating and TimePicker.


All these components have been ported to use AngularJS directives (ng-repeat and ng-controller) and custom HTML elements. For example, rather than using a <div> to wrap the Carousel, you can use a more “meaningful” custom element, <carousel> and <slide>:


 <carousel interval="slideInterval"> <slide ng-repeat="slide in slides" active="slide.active"> <img ng-src="slide.image"> </slide> </carousel> 

If you are a big fan of Bootstrap while also enjoy the power and the performance that AngularJS offered, this could be a perfect choice of framework.



2. Angular Foundation


Another popular framework that has also been ported to use AngularJS is Foundation, and it is simply named “Angular Foundation”.


Similarly, this framework has modified Foundation components to adopt AngularJS’s directive and custom HTML elements so you can now build your web application using more semantically named HTML element slike <top-bar>, <accordion>, and <pagination> , rather than the ambiguous <div>. Here is one example of how we add an Alert component with the <alert> element:


 <div ng-controller="alertArea"> <alert ng-repeat="alert in alerts" type="alert.type" close="closeAlert($index)">alert.msg</alert> </div> 

If you like Foundation better than Bootstrap, then this is the framework to go with. Download Angular Foundation in this page, or stay up-to-date with the project development through the Github repo.



3. Ionic Framework


Ionic comes with a handful of solid building-blocks that makes developing mobile applications easy and fast. Each component in the Ionic framework is optimized for mobile experience, which is basically dependent on touch and gestures. These UI components are also made up of custom HTML elements. In deploying a tabbed navigation, for example, you would use the <ion-tabs>:


 <ion-tabs class="tabs-default tabs-icon-only"> <ion-tab title="Home" icon-on="ion-ios-home" icon-off="ion-ios-home-outline"> </ion-tab> <!-- The rest of the tabs go here --> </ion-tabs> 

To make it even easier and faster to build your application, you can use Ionic Creator which lets you build your app by drag-n-drop. So if performance and speed is important to you, Ionic is the best framework to go with.



4. Mobile Angular UI


Mobile Angular UI is a mobile UI framework which is an extension of the Bootstrap framework, aimed to build mobile applications. It uses most of Bootstrap 3 syntaxes with some added specific mobile components such as switches, overlays, sidebars and scrollable areas. It is only dependent on AngularJS and you can easily bring your current web app into mobile version by adding provided CSS to turn your content responsive and touch-enabled.


Download this framework here



5. UI Grid


UI Grid is the best way to work a grid or table with Angular. It has rich features to display simple, and also complex and large datasets on a grid. UI Grid is designed to execute complex features only when needed, thus keeping the core small. With UI Grid you can bind cells to complex properties/functions, run column sorting and filtering, edit data in place and more. To change styles of your data grid display, use Customizer.


Get the latest UI Grid from its homepage.












5 AngularJS Frameworks to Get Apps Up and Running Quickly

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

15 Useful AngularJS Tools For Developers

Thinking of dipping your toes into Angular? If you have gone through our 10 best tutorials to learn AngularJS post and would like to play around with Angular on your own, you’re on the right post. We have here some tools that can streamline your development workflow.



We’re looking at 15 of the best IDEs, text editors, tools for testing & debugging, modules and development tools and apps for building with Angular. If you have your favorite tools or apps, do share them with us in the comments below.



IDE & Text Editor


In the programming world, there are two types of editors: full featured Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and lightweight text editors. Both allow for faster development workflow. The IDE and text editor we listed below are pretty good tools to speed up your Angular development. They can be easily configured for the Angular environment.


WebStorm


WebStorm is suited not just for Javascript but also HTML and CSS. It has an awesome live editor which lets you see your coding results on the browser without frequent refreshing needed. By default, their newest version carries the AngularJS plugin bundle although you will need to include the Angular script in your project first. For more details, read the WebStorm blog post.



Aptana


Aptana is a free open source IDE which is actually the customized version of Eclipse focusing on Javascript, HTML, CSS and other web goodies. To extend Aptana for Angular support, all you need to do is install the AngularJS Eclipse extension from the Eclipse Marketplace.



Sublime Text


One of the most popular text editors available, Sublime Text is loved by many because of its customizability to adapt to any kind of programming environment. It is also fast and has customizable code snippet support, and has many packages including the AngularJS package which allow you to work with Angular. Here is a great post by Dan Wahlin you can check out about this.




More on Sublime Text:


Testing & Debugging Tools


Testing and debugging are important parts of the development process especially in an environment like Angular. Here are some of the tools that can help you test and debug your application.


Karma


Karma is a great test runner made for Angular, but can also be used with any other Javascript framework. It supports any type of testing: unit testing, midway testing and E2E testing. Karma works by opening browsers that you list in the configuration file. It then communicates with the active browser using socket.io and asks you whether to run the test or not.



Jasmine


Jasmine is used for behavior-driven development (BDD), but you can use it for test-driven development (TDD) with a bit customization. It is usually coupled with Karma: Karma as the test runner, Jasmine as the test framework. Jasmine will automatically inspect all your Javascript classes and functions and notify you of unhandled code. The drawback is it doesn’t know which environment (browsers) the test performed, but Karma compensates for this disadvantage.



MochaJS


When compared to Jasmine, MochaJS is more flexible but Jasmine comes as an all-in-one package. With MochaJS, if you want to use spy framework, you need to set up Mocha with its appropriate library like sinon.js. And if you need assertion framework, Mocha needs to be configured with a framework like Chai.



Protractor


Protractor is probably the most powerful automated end to end (e2e) Angular testing tool. Developed by the Angular team, Protractor is built by combining some great technologies available today like NodeJS, Selenium, webDriver, Mocha, Cucumber and Jasmine.



Angular Batarang


Besides Protractor, another great tool developed by the Angular team is Angular Batarang. Batarang is a Chrome extension for debugging Angular applications. After inspecting your app, Batarang will show you the model, performance and dependency debugging results in three different tabs. You can also control the inspection, deciding whether to show the applications, bindings or scopes.



ng-inspector


ng-inspector is a browser extension supported on Chrome and Safari. Unlike Batarang which shows up in DevTools, ng-inspector prefers the side panel display instead. You can inspect and highlight DOM elements as you hover over a scope. You can also see the scope and model updated in real time.



Modules


The best place to find Angular modules is ngmodules.org. But if you need a quick overview, below is a list of some good resources we’ve collected for you.


AngularUI


AngularUI is a collection of UI components built with AngularJS. Its utility directives help you build Angular applications faster. Instead of widgets, AngularUI uses raw directives like ui-router, ui-map, ui-calendar etc. The directives you’ll probably like the most is its UI-Bootstrap which can natively create Twitter Bootstrap in Angular. Check out its clean and nice documentation page to get started.



ng-Table – Sorting and Filtering Table


If you need tables in your web application, the kind that can be sorted and filtered, then ngTable is the tool you are looking for. It also supports variable row heights and great pagination capabilities.



Restangular


With Angular, you may have a hard time working working $resource and $http for creating Rest API. Restangular can help make the usage of get, delete, update and post data requests easier. Some features that set Restangular apart from $resource are HTTP method support, self-linking element, promises usage and many more. Find out more here and check out the live demo on Plunkr.



Angular Gettext


Angular-Gettext is a superb Angular module for super-easy localization. The key features are you can translate your web app as easy as adding attribute. It lets you focus on your app development and leave all translations to Angular-Gettext.



Tools & Apps


Lastly, we’re just going to leave this here. It’s a list of more tools and apps that can probably make your Angular development process easier and smoother. They work well with those who are just starting to pick up Angular.


Generator Angular


Yeoman has a code generator called Generator Angular. With this tool, you can speed up your Angular development with only couples of terminal command. It can automatically generate development server, unit and framework testing, view, directives and more.



ngDocs – AngularJS Reference


ngDocs is an Android app that provides AngularJS documentation and references, nice and simple. Some basic tutorials are also available if you are new to Angular. There are additional features like a developer guide and error reference that you may like to see. With this on your Android device, pick up on Angular wherever you go.












15 Useful AngularJS Tools For Developers