So I just spent the past 5 hours reading up on Angular JS. It seems like a lot of people are heavily associating this framework to single page applications especially when accommodated with a back-end MVC framework with nice API usage like Ruby on Rails or Laravel.
I have 2 main questions that have been boggling me:
How do you initialize such apps considering that the content is
dynamic in nature. When using something like RoR/Laravel, I'd prepare
the HTML with the dynamic data at the back-end and then serve the
initial pages. It seems like most people using Angular serve up a
basic skeleton of the HTML and then do a round trip to web server
again for some data. Is this really how its done? if not, please
suggest a the right way.
Secondly, I dont think I am about to embark on a project with a
single paged application in mind. Does that mean it would be overkill
to use AngularJS for my project. Does anyone have a use case that
they think is appropriate that would require AngularJS with non
single page application that jQuery cant handle easily?
Related
I've been working with ASP.NET MVC for about a year now. I enjoy the ability to create SPA's especially by using the following tools:
Partial views(via html.action() and renderPartial())
Ajax helpers (Ajax.Actionlink() and Ajax.beginform())
My question is, Is it safe to just continue without a JavaScript frameworks or am i seriously missing out on something by not utilising a Javascript framework like Angular JS.
This depends a lot of the type of application you are building, but in general you don't necessarily have to choose between ASP.NET MVC and Angular, you can use both in a project.
For example, if you have a page with a grid where the user will add rows and you have to calculate sums etc you could use angular on that page (and it will speed up the development process).
But if you have pages with static content you can just serve an html file there using ASP.NET MVC.
And you can even use both of them. For something like a blog post, you can use a static html file for the post content and then implement the comments are with angular.
Since ASP.NET is a server side framework, it can only go that far as AJAX insertions. Angular JS is a client side Framework, designed for SPA in mind. If you are going for a light SPA, ASP.NET will do nicely, but I think you should use the right tools for the right job. Don't hesitate to mix them in order to find the right place between server side rendering and client side dynamism.
You are definitely missing some things.
The purpose of frameworks such as angular is not just to handle your bootstrap tab switches or whatever to display just parts of the UI rather than everything. Sure, you can create small and simple SPAs by utilizing such logic but once you come to create real-world apps that approach will become unusable. The reasons to this are:
Your site will be highly unmaintainable
Frameworks like angular provide much more than just templating (more on that in a moment) but features such as routing, which allows on-demand content loading. That is, instead of sending the whole page to the client, much of which (s)he maybe will not even take a look at, you can load fragments of HTML on-demand, which reduces network usage. Imagine you had to download everything (posts, images, videos, chat messages etc) on Facebook and hide them until you actually want to see them.
Back to templating, this is a very powerful feature. Again, in the case of simple apps you can use custom JS code - that is, concatenate strings to create fragments of HTML and then insert them into the DOM. But even with simple apps this is a smelly thing to do. Imagine you had to write custom JS to concatenate your chat messages in an app like Facebook then insert them into the DOM. With angular2, for example, you can do something like this:
<ul>
<li *ngFor="let msg of messages">{{msg.Sender}} said: {{msg.Content}}</li>
</ul>
This way, Angular2 will do all the parsing and DOM handling for you. That is, you write declarative markup rather than imperative logic for what you want to display.
All in all, they help you to decouple the logic from the UI so you should definitely dig into any of the popular frameworks and get a taste of their capabilities if you want to create rich apps. You will not regret it.
I would like to build a new web site using AngularJS. The idea is to build a server side API with Ruby on Rails that serve Json to a front-end AngularJS.
My question is: Is it better to create a full AngluarJS front-end or a standard ruby on rails front-end with some Angular ?
I know Angular can handle routing so a full application is possible but it looks like the default behavior is for single page app.
For example I wonder if it's not a problem to make some change in an angular page 1 that should modify a page 2. This page 2 will not be updated until an action is taken on the page or the user reload the page.
Is there something wrong in my approach ? What do you advise ?
Thanks for reading.
I have personally done variations of a number of angular apps, varying from SPA with 50K+ views to simply using angular as an extension of basic javascript for useful testing and modularization.
The answer to your question isn't actually all that technical but more has to do with the nature of your application and team (You're essentially trying to pick what type of screwdriver to use). As what you're trying to do is feasible on both the client and server side.
Important questions to ask:
Is your team more comfortable in Rails or Angular
How dynamic are your web pages expected to be
What browsers are you supporting
Is there a requirement for data latency and communication with the server
Are you also going to be reusing the server API for other applications
These questions will drive you towards use of Angular or Rails or the combination of the technologies to find the balance.
The routing mechanism in angular is only within a single window object.
If you have two windows you will have two angular applications. If you want to communicate between the windows object angular does not provide any special mechanism further than standard HTML and javascript.
I don't know what is the better approach for you, that depends in your business requirements and constraints.
I am very new to javascript and have mainly been learning Rails previously. I want to be able to make more dynamic websites that give a more dynamic user experience but I am not sure wether to learn Angular.js or JQuery. I want to still serve the web pages through Rails and do not want to get into learning how to build a full SPA and Rails API and connect the two yet.
On the one hand I can see JQuery would be good for adding dynamic interactions to my pages but I have also seen that Angular.js is very popular and many people have told me I should go straight into learning angular. I also like the idea of being able to eventually make full SPAs with Angular in the future.
My main concern is I do not feel ready to start learning how to completely separate my frontend and backend using a rails API and a Javascript framework and would prefer to just add some interactivity to my pages and continue furthering my knowledge of Rails.
Is it possible to use angular to add small amounts of interactivity to multiple pages without having a SPA front end and Rails API?
Thanks for any advice.
Of course you can.
Add html pages to your public folder and put a script reference to AngularJS and you are good to go.
We currently have an asp.net webforms web application, which needs updating in terms of look and speed. I think its time to redevelop it and was thinking about creating a webApi and change the website to asp mvc. But then i started using AngularJS and loved it, now i am thinking about redeveloping our site using AngularJs and a webApi.
Am i right in thinking that using AngularJs + ASP MVC is pointless, as they are nearly the same thing (although 1 is clientside and 1 is server side)
Also i have a couple questions about using angularJs on a website.
On the mobile apps that i have used angularJS i have used the routeProvider and stateProvider to change the page. This adds #/SOMETHING to the url and angular loads the correct content accordingly. Does this work ok with search engines like google?
Should the whole web application be 1 app within angular, or should it be broken down into app modules and each be a separate "app", even though it is 1 website? I am wondering about performance. Say i have a website where the user can look at companies, contacts, projects. Each module may have 10 different pages, can angular handle this? In our app we would have over 20 modules, each with maybe 10 pages+.
Is this something i should avoid? Would ASP MVC + webApi be better?
Any other views and opinions are greatly welcome, i want to get as much information as possible before making my decision and developing.
Thanks in advance
Let me try to address some of your concerns.
ASP.Net Partial views can still be used even if you decide to use AngularJS and WebAPI. Have a server view has some advantages. For example if your view has element that are only accessible to authorize users in a specific role, then better to not emit that view content from server, rather than hiding it on client side using AngularJS.
I have not done mobile development using AngularJS so i cannot answer your bullet point 1. But as far as SEO goes every client side framework has the same challenge. Google SEO techniques for Angular and you may find something interesting.
Regarding bullet 2, all depends. Multiple SPA apps can be created if the functionality is tangential. For example user side of app and admin side of the app can be different SPA but they can be a single SPA too. I think it all depends upon on scenario and there is no hard and fast rule.
For bullet 3, this is too broad question. I can only say AngularJS is a very capable framework and can do everything that MVC+ WebApi can achieve. There is a learning curve involved and it takes some time to do stuff the Angular way but i believe it is well worth.
Soon I'll start working on the next version of a website I've built. Basically it's kind of a CRM. Lots of tables, forms, CRUD everywhere. The problem is that it's going to be nearly a rewrite cause of huge requirements for functionality for the up-coming version, and we will need to make the website a bit more interactive, responsive and user friendly.
Currently it's ASP.NET MVC 4, with some jQuery for ajax stuff. MVC 4 application acts as a glue/proxy between client-side and underlying service which provides all the data, so WebApp has no direct communication with database. Also MVC 4 application is where business objects are transformed into ViewModels. We use DataAnnotations Validation for ViewModels.
Now what I was looking for, is to somehow integrate something like AngularJs. The goal is to move closer to SPA, give the client-side some structure, as building more functionality on top of existing jQuery code will just result in a sphagetti. However, writing full-blown SPA is not really an option, as it will require way too much effort and time, as always, is not unlimited.
For start the goal is to move Html forms management to AngularJs. That means I need a way to render MVC partial view with MVC model, and let Angular take over the controll. Posting changes/updating the view should be handled by Angular.
I have been researching Angular + asp.net for a while now, and the problem is that I need MVC models, but Angular also needs a 'model' ($scope). I know about ng-init, but some models will be quite complex. so it does not seem like a good idea.
Also server side validation (DataAnotations with loads of customized stuff) with unobtrusive client-side validation works very well for us, so would like to keep that and somehow make it work with Angular.
I've also looked into AngularJs/BreezeJs/MVC4, but breeze mvc integration is focused on EntityFramework, and it needs model metadata for client-side to be able to save, update and cache entities. And as mentioned earlier, mvc app does not access database directly, nor has a way to generate metadata. Writing by hand is not an option.
I know I'm trying to make some kind of hybrid and would have a lot's of issues having models on server and client sides, so I am looking for an advice which way should I go.
Is this doable?
Maybe I can generate metadata for Breeze js from existing ViewModels on MVC (breeze seems to work with dataanotations and validation works on client-side, at least minimally)?
Maybe this is a nonsense and I should either continue with MVC app, or go full-SPA, and there is no easy way to combine them both.