I've mostly worked with Springboot framework only with JSP to cover the things I need for the website part. Now, I've got a project to do that mostly revolves, if not all, around the website and I have a couple of questions.
Just to be clear first, I don't have experience either with Thymeleaf or Angular so whichever I pick will be the first time (I think thymeleaf syntax would be easier for me to handle).
Ok so the main goal in my mind is not to render the whole page every time I load data from the backend, so I figure I would have like a header/content/footer parts where every time I click something only the content part would change. Also, I would like the possibility for a loader to show and go away when the content part is changing. This web application will need to be secure for users that register.
I've searched the web to investigate both frameworks, but can not seem to find the right answer so I can continue with my development
I do not mind creating separate REST services in later development if some other platform needs to hook up to the service if I decide to go with Thymeleaf.What do you guys think in what direction should I go, Thymeleaf or Angular? Any help and/or discussion would be much appreciated.
I am sorry if this seems like a general question, but I just need some basic guidelines to start with. Cheers!
I think transitioning to ThymeLeaf is probably going to be the easiest for you, but Angular is a great choice as well, and from there it is up to you. Would you rather use mostly expressions similar to JSTL expressions, but in Spring's SpEL language, then use ThymeLeaf, or would you rather use JavaScript, then use Angular. It just a user's preference for what you are doing.
The fragmenting portion (header, footer, body, etc..) is native to both frameworks. It just depends on which one you want to use. Whatever you go with, to load specific sections while not rendering the others, is going to require AJAX and for you to feel comfortable with how the template frameworks work.
I would suggest reading up on both of them to figure out which one you feel more comfortable with.
Angular
Thymeleaf
Both of them have great documentation for beginners and the Baeldung and Mkyong have good walkthrus for ThymeLeaf. Angular's documentation I found good enough on its own.
For a loader, you can do with simple CSS and JS. There is a ton of demos out there on how to do full screen loaders and how to turn them on or off with JS or CSS. IHateTomatoes has a good article about how to build a full screen loader, that has a No JS fallback option and should give you a good starting point.
Your point about it needing to be secure is a whole other monster. I would look into Spring Security. It's relatively straightforward, especially when using Spring Boot. If you want it can control the users session and assist in preventing session jacking, add CSRF to prevent cross site forgery, control permissions to urls and on down the line, or not. It all just depends.
Either way, don't randomly stab at security, it will end up in something that you feel is secure but it is not, which leaves you and your users in a very bad spot. Again, Baeldung has a great walkthru on the user registration and login process that can help get you started with Spring security and how to tie everything together.
Pretty high level answer, but hopefully gave you some good starting points and some resources.
Build apps decoupling frontend from the backend.
Always build apps following the "The API-first approach"
The API-first approach involves setting up the foundation of your app, which is the application programming interface
For me the differences between Thymeleaf and Angular:
Using Thymeleaf: You don't need to create Restful/web service endpoints on your frontend side because you just need to make calls to the backend from the frontend itself.
Using Angular: Besides of your Restful/ web service endpoints on your backend side, you have to build Restful/ web services endpoints on your frontend side because you don't want to expose direct access from Javascript code to the backend.
Hope this helps and happy coding time!
Related
I have a Back-end web application that provides me with custom API endpoints (Java - Spring). I like to keep everything separate. one API application that provides everything else remotely. My question is: What is the best practice to start a new Front-end project that connects to my API?
Requirements:
The Front-end project should be on a different server
The Front-end project should support routing, meaning I will have full control regarding the /paths. so no .extensions at the end.
SEO is very important in this specific case.
My preference is to go with React.js but I have doubts regarding SEO because the project I want to migrate from is WordPress (up and running with a good SEO performance).
I wish that I can find a simple solution with pure HTML, CSS and some kind of JavaScript.
Thank you.
React isn't actually bad for SEO. So long as you're taking the proper steps to ensure that the page load time isn't bad. If the site that you're migrating is massive, make sure you're lazy loading.
If you have doubts that Google or other search engines will render the js, then I suggest going with Nextjs like Rakesh K mentioned.
There's also nothing wrong with recreating the site with a templating language like Handlebars, then rendering it on an Express server, or whatever suits you. Just including this option in case you don't know React, and don't want to have to learn it.
I am creating a HTML5 website and I need to create a site search box that
displays results in a results page with description and photo.
How would I go about this.
I have looked alot and only see google search and thats not what im after.
Can this be done without PHP or RAILS?
Looking for purely JS and html5 and css and jquery.
Thanks and a point i the correct direction would be great.
Example is this Wordpress sites search http://agroamerica.com/
I dont want to use WP but hand code it.
Any help is great.
Your best bet, given that you don't want to implement a third party indexing service, would be to set an indexing function on your server's back end to handle search requests. You mentioned Rails, and there are some pretty great gems for this.
One point of trouble you will have with this question is that, in my experience, full site search functionality without a back end / database to query is not a very useful solution for any applications I've seen.
However, given that you want to keep it JS, you might look into the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular.js, Node.js) which does some pretty sweet things like two-way data binding. It's a pure Javascript solution (albeit not a purely-front end solution).
Honestly, it sounds like you might be taking too big of bites to start off with. Try working through a scripting language on a site like Code Academy and learning about basic web application setups like MVC (a common way to handle different parts of a web application (used by the aforementioned Rails)). Stack Overflow users can be pretty brutal when you ask questions about advanced functionality without some understanding of the functionality's underlying elements or functional requirements, and search engines from the ground up have historically been the thing of doctoral dissertations.
Good luck!
I've built a REST API backend using Django and am now at the stage of designing a client facing frontend. Though, I can't seem to understand how this client frontend should be structured and which languages it should use.
PHP is server-side, and is usually used as the language for building backends. When coupled with a framework such as Codeigniter, it can also be used to play around with sessions, route URLs, and decide which templates to use. Though, I don't believe it can be used to call my REST API to fetch resources (might be wrong here, correct me please if I am).
Javascript is client facing but is used only once the webpage has been fetched from the server. AngularJS is great, but from what I've read, it seems it only helps add very dynamic functionality into already rendered static pages.
I am really open to any ideas, suggestions, and advice based on your experiences creating client frontends. So, back to my original question, how does one structure a REST client frontend, which language is best for this goal, and if which frameworks should one consider to use?
Update 1
Someone asked whether this client frontend will be run in a browser -- the answer is yes, it will. I am trying to build a Twitter-like web client frontend that interacts with a Twitter-like REST API backend. Basically, everything you see there when you go on Twitter's website.
Since it is a browser frontend I would go with HTML/JavaScript only. No need to use PHP or any server side language IMHO. This has the advantage of being extremely portable.
I would also use a JS framework for that purpose ( the trend nowadays seems to be angular).
REST really, really isn't new. It's been a part of HTTP at least as far back as HTTP 1.1
Have a look at this question: Backbone.js frontend with RESTful Rails backend? the top answer lists 20 possible frameworks for building a front end.
Thanks for your help, everyone. Found exactly what I was looking for here:
http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/
A nice little library for Python that allows me to basically make calls to a REST backend from within a Django application, which serves as my frontend.
AngularJS will also be used for to make the static pages that Django returns more dynamic. Why? Because AngularJS by itself can be the complete solution only if your whole site consists of one page. If you have multiple pages where each one has it's own set of dynamic elements, you need a combination of Django and AngularJS.
Apparently REST is still quite new and it seems there aren't many people that have stumbled upon this very fundamental question like I have.
Once again, thanks!
When would one go for using Javascript MVC ? I mean why there was a
need for JS-MVC ?
Is it only because this design pattern was famous in other languages, for code maintenance,readability and many web apps are shipping client side ?
How does it helps a developer, tester and end-user easing their
tasks ?
Any use-case where JS-MVC is suited best and any case where it is
not at all required ?
Question 1,2,4
My view is that you should apply any kind of design pattern only and only if you really need it. Simply because design patterns aren't easy after all. They will add complexity to your solution, but they'll also provide you the benefit of (normally) being established and working solutions for specific kind of problems.
Whether to use or not use them really depends on what you are going to construct and how complex it is. That said, I'm probably not going to structure my 200 lines jQuery plugin using the MVC pattern, maybe...
But at work we create single page applications where we have 2-5 devs working on a project the same time, projects of the amount of 500 days. In such environments things can get complex very quickly and if you don't follow any kind of proper structuring you're lost.
I hope that should answer your question 1 and 2.
For question 3:
The end-user hopefully gets a better quality app with less bugs, but usually he shouldn't even notice (nor does he care) about the underlying architecture of an app.
MVC helps the developer
as an orientation when navigating in the app's source code. Consider an app of 3000 lines of code in a single source file and then when having 4 devs working on it at the same time. A mess, right? When having an MVC app which normally also use routings etc...you normally already know by looking at the route in the url where the corresponding controller lies in the source code and where you should put your hands on
for easier testing. Separation of concerns is always beneficial when applying unit testing practices because you can much easier test your controller because it isn't directly couple to data or presentational stuff (like HTML code etc). And just as a side note, you should definitely unit-test your JavaScript code, definitely!!
maintenance: which is the result of the previous points somehow
I'm not sure which kind of figure you intend by "tester". If he writes automated tests at the unit or acceptance level, then the benefits from before pretty much hold as well. If he's testing the app as a whole in the sense of navigating around, taking the app as a black box by testing its reaction to different kind of inputs, then MVC doesn't really play a big role for him. It's like for the end-user.
So I hope I was able to clarify some things for you. But as said, never just follow a pattern because people follow it but only 'cause it gives you any kind of benefits.
MVC is used to structure your code especially if you are working a lot with client side rendering. Without structure your code gets complex very fast.
User experience for end user is much better when you don't have to wait for the whole page refresh if you only need partial update.
It helps to navigate through the code much faster if you have well defined structure of your code.
JS MVC frameworks are best used where you have complex systems and you want to provide better user experience by using AJAX and partial page reloads or updates. Usually you would not use MVC for Personal website, blogs or stuff like that...
Preamble
So, this question has already been answered, but as it was my first question for this project, I'm going to continue to reference it in other questions I ask for this project.
For anyone who came from another question, here is the basic idea: Create a web app that can make it much easier to create other web applications or websites. To do this, you would basically create a modular site with "widgets" and then combine them into the final display pages. Each widget would likely have its own set of functions combined in a Class if you use Prototype or .prototype.fn otherwise.
Currently
I am working on getting the basics down: editing CSS, creating user JavaScript functions and dynamically finding their names/inputs, and other critical technical aspects of the project. Soon I will create a rough timeline of the features I wish to create. Soon after I do this, I intent to create a Blog of sorts to keep everyone informed of the project's status.
Original Question
Hello all, I am currently trying to formalize an idea I have for a personal project (which may turn into a professional one later on). The concept is a reflective web application. In other words, a web application that can build other web applications and is actively used to build and improve itself. Think of it as sort of a webapp IDE for creating webapps.
So before I start explaining it further, my question to all of you is this: What do you think would be some of the hardest challenges along the way and where would be the best place to start?
Now let me try to explain some of the aspects of this concept briefly here. I want this application to be as close to a WYSIWYG as possible, in that you have a display area which shows all or part of the website as it would appear. You should be free to browse it to get to the areas you want to work on and use a JavaScript debugger/console to ask "what would happen if...?" questions.
I intend for the webapps to be built up via components. In other words, the result would be a very modular webapp so that you can tweak things on a small or large scale with a fair amount of ease (generally it should be better than hand coding everything in <insert editor of choice>).
Once the website/webapp is done, this webapp should be able to produce all the code necessary to install and run the created website/webapp (so CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and PHP installer for the database).
Here are the few major challenges I've come up with so far:
Changing CSS on the fly
Implementing reflection in JavaScript
Accurate and brief DOM tree viewer
Allowing users to choose JavaScript libraries (i.e. Prototype, jQuery, Dojo, extJS, etc.)
Any other comments and suggestions are also welcome.
Edit 1: I really like the idea of AppJet and I will check it out in detail when I get the time this weekend. However, my only concern is that this is supposed to create code that can go onto others webservers, so while AppJet might be a great way for me to develop this app more rapidly, I still think I will have to generate PHP code for my users to put on their servers.
Also, when I feel this is ready for beta testers, I will certainly release it for free for everyone on this site. But I was thinking that out of beta I should follow a scheme similar to that of git: Free for open source apps, costs money for private/proprietary apps.
Conceptually, you would be building widgets, a widget factory, and a factory making factory.
So, you would have to find all the different types of interactions that could be possible in making a widget, between widgets, within a factory, and between multiple widget making factories to get an idea.
Something to keep on top of how far would be too far to abstract?
**I think you would need to be able to abstract a few layers completely for the application space itself. Then you'd have to build some management tool for it all. **
- Presentation, Workflow and the Data tier.
Presentation: You are either receiving feedback, or putting in input. Usually as a result of clicking, or entering something. A simple example is making dynamic web forms in a database. What would you have to store in a database about where it comes/goes from? This would probably make up the presentation layer. This would probably be the best exercise to start with to get a feel for what you may need to go with.
Workflow: it would be wise to build a simple workflow engine. I built one modeled on Windows Workflow that I had up and running in 2 days. It could set the initial event that should be run, etc. From a designer perspective, I would imagine a visio type program to link these events. The events in the workflow would then drive the presentation tier.
Data: You would have to store the data about the application as much as the data in the application. So, form, event, data structures could possibly be done by storing xml docs depending on whether you need to work with any of the data in the forms or not. The data of the application could also be stored in empty xml templates that you fill in, or in actual tables. At that point you'd have to create a table creation routine that would maintain a table for an app to the spec. Google has something like this with their google DB online.
Hope that helps. Share what you end up coming up with.
Why use PHP?
Appjet does something really similar using 100% Javascript on the client and server side with rhino.
This makes it easier for programmers to use your service, and easier for you to deploy. In fact even their data storage technique uses Javascript (simple native objects), which is a really powerful idea.