I am new to Angular and making a small project.
For now, I have one large App.js where I define my route config and controllers and such.
In my index.html file, I link to this script file and everything works fine, I have multiple views and a small working app.
Now I would like to extract the controllers from my big javascript file, but then, what is the best way to include all those files? I do not want to have one script tag per file.
If you are worried about the fact that you will add the files manually over and over again, you could try to automate this process using Gulp or Grunt but it will take a bit of research. What I recommend, though, is using an already set-up generator with these systems in place for you. Such a generator would be the Hottowel generator made by John Papa, which also respect his Angular Styleguide.
Whatever you choose in the end is your preference, but I recommend looking into such generators and explore their way of doing the architecture of an Angular application and then see what suits your needs best.
Related
I am using Yeoman to auto-generate a project using Bootstrap & Sass. The one thing I am having trouble with is changing the default structure of the project to be more modularized. The generator is here on GitHub.com
Currently the application is structured like so:
/app
/images/
/scripts/
/controllers/
main.js
app.js
/styles/
main.css
/views/
main.html
index.html
I'd rather have it separated into individual directives with a core(shared) folder, so that it would be like so:
/app/
/directives/
/home/
home.html
homeCtrl.js
home.sass
index.html
app.module.js
app.route.js
But I am having difficulty figuring out the best method of modularizing the project. Am I supposed to be creating the file structure that I want with the pre-generated application, and then edit it within the Gruntfile.js? Is there a more streamlined way of doing this, or am I SOL doing it manually?
The best and elegant way is to follow their guideline around creating a customised template which you can use to generate apps based on it.
However, if this is a one off thing you probably won't need to bother unless you want to create something decent and share it with community, so other people can use your template and create their app with modularised structure.
Even if you don't try to write your own template you can still read the guide and modify the initial template generator to change the file structure before creating the app for you.
Here is another good article around template customisation:
https://scotch.io/tutorials/create-a-custom-yeoman-generator-in-4-easy-steps
This project appears to be abandoned. The most recent change is a year ago, there are 67 issues and 18 pull requests. It's probably only generating Angular 1.x code as well, and that may not be "up to date" with current Angular 1 best practices.
You can, of course, fork the project and make changes yourself, and even take over maintenance of it, but you might be better to look at something like Angular-cli, which generates Angular2 code, and is being actively developed.
Do i have to include all my javascript file while loading main index page?
In single page application when we are not logged in, we include all of our .js file in main index file. This contains js file that is only needed when users are logged in.
What is better approach of managing angular app in this context?
Simple answer: yes.
Your application is a single-page one, so you can combine all JS files into one and load it at one request. It saves time for processing in the future.
Alternatively, create two pages login.html and others.html, then load two different sets of JS files accordingly.
Normally, nowadays the bandwidth is not the bottleneck, loading a larger JS file does not make trouble (usually).
You can split your code into multiple modules and then just load the js needed for that module.
I suggest using Gulp with packages to inject HTML when appropriate. You then have single lines of code as place holders for your Javascript and you run the Gulp task to inject the Javascript into the areas where it is needed.
You could also run gulp tasks to minify your js into just a few minified files. You will need to be sure your js in min safe (gulp can do this too).
If you make AMD - most often using RequireJS - then you won't need to include all from the very beginning.
A while ago we did a similar project, although without AngularJS, and by using RequireJS we made the different pages, which use different files. And this way people's browsers will never download certain files if they never go to certain pages.
(Of course, we had many pages inside the app, not just 2 or 3, where this wouldn't make any difference.)
In order to build static web pages to serve interactive news applications (mostly data visualizations scripted with something like D3 or lightweight apps built with Bootstrap.js), is it worth the effort to install and configure a build system like Middleman or Grunt.js?
The reason why I am asking is because I am not familiar with Ruby and Ruby Gems at all, and do not have the time and willingness at the moment to dwelve deeper into it, as I already know Python & Javascript pretty well.
Do I need to know Ruby in order to use Middleman productively? Or should I just use Grunt? I am asking because I want to reuse the same templates over and over again and heard that this is easy with Middleman.
There is a distinct difference between Middleman and Grunt.
Grunt is a generic task runner while Middleman is a static site generator.
Middleman for example would be used to create a site with multiple URLs. You put some files in a folder and Middleman takes care of arranging them, creating subfolders for URLs, rendering layouts, compressing assets and in the end you have a bunch of files that represent the site. All this is built in.
You don’t necessarily need to know a lot of Ruby to get started with Middleman, but to get the most out of it, understand how it works and change configurations to your needs, basic Ruby knowledge is key.
Grunt on the other hand works by using plugins and telling them exactly what to do. By default it does nothing. You could think of Grunt as "framework", ready for you to add tasks. Compress these two css files. Combine these JS files and move theme over here. Things like that.
For building a complete website I recommend Middleman. In order to be able to use the templates you create in another language like JS, you could use Jade as a templating language. By default Middleman uses ERB (part of the Ruby standard library). Another popular choice is HAML, but I’m not sure if there is a decent JS compiler for it.
If you want to have really fine grained control over the output of your JS files (you’re talking about JS client side apps in your question) you can even use Grunt and Middleman together. Grunt would take care of the assets (you can have really detailed configurations there) and Middleman would handle templating, URL generation and all the other "default website related" stuff.
If you're keen to use Grunt as a base for this sort of build, you may like to look at Assemble.io.
This is a static-site generator like Middleman, but one that is completely (currently) dependant upon Grunt tasks in order to do its thing.
I believe the learning curve for Assemble.io is rather higher than Middleman. It is based on Node, rather than Ruby. However I don't believe it's necessary to know Ruby in order to get a lot from Middleman.
You may have a look to http://wintersmith.io/ a static page generator like Jekill or MiddleMan (I don't really know this one)
With Grunt you have something at a lower level: Grunt provides you tasks to automate things so you'll have to find or write the task that fits your needs.
We have a large web project, where we need components which can talk to each other which can be put in a central repository of components for different projects.
Using reuirejs and Backbone for the modular development. Went through different boilerplate available for backbone and requirejs, but none matched my requirement. So I have created following directory structure. It can be explained as follows.
---resources
|---custom-components
|---mycomponent
|---js
|---views
|---models
|---collections
|---css
|---templates
|---mycomponent.js
|---mycomponent2
|---js
|---views
|---models
|---collections
|---css
|---templates
|---mycomponent2.js
|---libraries
|---backbone
|---underscore
|---jquery
|---jquery-ui
|---jqueryplugins
|---jcarouselite
|---thirdpartyplugins
|---page-js
|---mypage.js
|---mypage2.js
resources directory will contain all the resources. Under that we will have 4 directories as mentioned.
libraries, jqueryplugins and thirdpartyplugins are obviusly the directories for the name they say.
page-js directory will contain the actual main-js which will be used inside our html file as requirejs data-main attribute.
Custom-component is where all widgets created by us will reside, as you can see it has a js file with same name as that of the component, which will be entry point of this widget. This directory also has directories for js, css and templates. CSS and templates will be loaded by text plugin and CSS plugin respectively. Js directory will contain all the backbone code to make this widget work.
Custom components will be asked by main-js residing in page-js.
Coming to what I need.
1. I want experts to have review this directory structure in perspective of large web projects, where you will need to share your widgets with other teams. suggestions are welcome.
2. My each custom-component will define a module, which will have dependencies within package structure as well as outside package structure. I want to know, if there is any way to use r.js to optimize only my custom widget dependency within package structure and let the plugins and libraries optimized separately.
3. I am developing single page ajax application, so I will be asking modules on demand so I need to cleanup modules and widgets when I dont need them, is there any way for cleaning up I should be aware of?
About the directory structure
As a directory structure pattern, I highly recommend using directory structure of cakePHP. it's really robust as in words!! I'm running multiple apps (one of them is as big as Groupon) and it works just like a charm.
You may need to tweak it a little because, you know, cake is a PHP framework and yours is a javascript one.
Here is the cake's awesome MVC directory structure:
Please note that you may host thousands of apps on a single cake installation. so if you're interested, what are you waiting for? go to their site and read their docs.
About the cleaning up techniques
Well, here is one of the downsides of the Javascript which I don't like. there is no real way to destroy a OO module like in Java or C++. here we don't have such things like C++'s ~ destructors.
For many years, programmers use module = null to free up memory from un-used codes.
Take a look at these also:
Can dynamically loaded JavaScript be unloaded?
Loading/unloading Javascript dynamically
How to unload a javascript from an html?
Hope it helps and good luck on designing your app ;D
Probably I'm late in answering this, but anyway let me share my views here, incase someone else finds it useful.
Your directory structure looks alright. It is always a better design to keep your business components self contained in to a particular directory. I will not recommend Cake MVC structure which break the Open Close Principle. Also have a look at the directory structure recommended by http://boilerplatejs.org which is a reference architecture for large scale JavaScript development.
I do not get the question very clear. when r.js is run it will optimize all JS files it find in the directory (exclude possible) and then create a single script by going though the dependency tree. In production you only need that single script (plus locale files if i18n plugin is used)
Read my blog post below. It might give you some hints: http://blog.hasith.net/2012/11/how-much-multi-page-single-page.html
I'm very new to the JavaScript library world. I have used JS by itself before to create a mini social network but this is the first time I use a JS library and I really don't know how to go about this.
I'm planning to use Google Closure and I'm really not sure how I should go about organizing the code. Should I put everything in one file since it's a web app and should have one screen? Should I separate the code to many chunks and put them in different files? Or should I put different dialogs (like settings) in a separate page and thus a separate file?
Like all programmers I'm a perfectionist so please help me out with this one, thanks.
If you're using Closure, you can use the closure compiler. I'd recommend multiple js files that are compiled into a single resource by the compiler. You'd reference that single js file in your html, so you wouldn't have to link to all of them.
Then, since you have multiple JS file, you can organize them in a logical way that will help you separate logic from UI from communications, etc. Also, if you're writing unit tests (JsUnit) it will be easier to write one test file per js file.
Depends...
What I do is add all my code in one file(librarys are always in different files) and then even though some of it wont be used, there will be no need to add multiple scripts to the page. If you have 20 files with script, it can be very confusing knowing which one to use.