Skip to main content

Improvising Angular + Require template

Sometime back I wrote a post on using Angular and Require to create a project template. The idea was to make the application more modular and broken down into multiple components that can be easily reused. I have made some more modifications to the template, especially the naming conventions used for files and minor changes to the structure of the project.

Here's the snapshot of the directory structure:

/components
   /login
      login.directive.js
      login.html
      login.module.js
      login.scss

/domain
      domain.module.js
      Players.js
      User.js

/services
      backendUrlsProvider.js
      common-services.module.js


The major change has been moving the stylesheets (scss files) for the various components inside the components directory and create <component>.module.js file inside the same directory. I have removed the modules directory which listed all the module files for the application. This change enables reusing the component by copying one single directory instead of copying multiple directories (scripts and styles).

The next change was to create a module for the models listed under domain directory. These models were associated with components but that didn't encourage reusability. By having one domain module that lists all domain services, it can be used across the application. Also, the idea is to have components being agnostic of the services. The components are responsible for rendering the views and they delegate the responsibility of calling a service to the parent controllers which are listed under pages directory (see previous post).

The services directory would contain a set of common services that can be used by components or services. I have added backendUrlsProvider.js file which is a constant service, providing a map between the service and the corresponding URLs:

return {
    login: '/user/login',
    register: '/user/register',
    players: '/players'
};


If there's a change in the URL then it would be updated here and no changes would be required to be made in the services files.

A new addition to the template is the use of the Gulp to generate the build. The build generation steps include: cleaning the dist directory, running jshint, compiling and minifying stylesheets, annotating Angular files using @ngInject, minifying HTML files, minifying JavaScript files using r.js optimizer, adding a new revision, using html-replace to inject JavaScript files and CSS stylesheets, removing mock modules reference when a Production build is generated.

Take a look at the code on Github: https://github.com/sagar-ganatra/angular-require-template


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Adding beforeRender and afterRender functions to a Backbone View

I was working on a Backbone application that updated the DOM when a response was received from the server. In a Backbone View, the initialize method would perform some operations and then call the render method to update the view. This worked fine, however there was scenario where in I wanted to perform some tasks before and after rendering the view. This can be considered as firing an event before and after the function had completed its execution. I found a very simple way to do this with Underscore's wrap method.
Post a Comment
Read more

De-obfuscating javascript code in Chrome Developer Tools

I had blogged about JavaScript debugging with Chrome Developer Tools  some time back, wherein I have explained how these developer tools can help in debugging javascript code. Today Google Chrome 12 was released and my Chrome browser was updated to this version. As with every release, there have been some improvements made on performance, usability etc,. One feature that stood out for me is the ability to De-obfuscate the javascript code. What is Minification? Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters such as white spaces, comments, new lines from the source code. These otherwise would be added to make the code more readable. Minifying the source code helps in reducing the file size and thereby reducing the time taken to download the file. This is the reason why most of the popular javascript libraries such as jQuery are minified. A minified jQuery file is of 31 KB in size where as an uncompressed one is about 229 KB. Unfortunately, debugging minified javascript f
7 comments
Read more

On GraphQL and building an application using React Apollo

When I visualize building an application, I would think of using React and Redux on the front-end which talks to a set of RESTful services built with Node and Hapi (or Express). However, over a period of time, I've realized that this approach does not scale well when you add new features to the front-end. For example, consider a page that displays user information along with courses that a user has enrolled in. At a later point, you decide to add a section that displays popular book titles that one can view and purchase. If every entity is considered as a microservice then to get data from three different microservices would require three http  requests to be sent by the front-end app. The performance of the app would degrade with the increase in the number of http requests. I read about GraphQL and knew that it is an ideal way of building an app and I need not look forward to anything else. The GraphQL layer can be viewed as a facade which sits on top of your RESTful services o
Post a Comment
Read more