Johns Hopkins University: Single Page Web Applications with AngularJS
INSTRUCTORS
Instructors: Yaakov Chaikin
In this course, we will explore the core design of AngularJS 1.x (latest version of AngularJS 1), its components and code organization techniques. We will enhance the functionality of our web app by utilizing dependency injection to reuse existing services as well as write our own. We will create reusable HTML components that take advantage of AngularJS data binding as well as extend HTML syntax with a very powerful feature of AngularJS called directives. We’ll set up routing so our SPA can have multiple views. We will also learn how to unit test our functionality. At the end of this course, you will build a fully functional, well organized and tested web application using AngularJS and deploy it to the cloud.
Course include
Module 2 - Filters, Digest Cycle, Controller Inheritance, and Custom Services
-We will start this module by learning how to use Angular filters to manipulate our data into the format we want and learn how to create our own custom filters. We will then dive deep into the digest cycle, which is the process AngularJS uses to magically update our web page with the bound data from our ViewModel or the controller. Understanding this process is crucial in getting comfortable with AngularJS. We’ll also see some cases where we’ll need to assist that process somewhat and understand why that is. After that, we’ll learn one of the most fundamental concepts in the Javascript programming language, which is Prototypal Inheritance. Clear understanding of that topic is a must before we talk about inheritance between AngularJS controllers in our application. We’ll finish off the module by learning how to create our own custom Angular services as well as how to configure them. With custom Angular services we’ll be able to share data across different controllers or other components in our application. We will also learn a few useful Angular directives that allow us to place looping and conditional logic direction into our HTML. You’ll see that by the end of this module, you’ll have the skills to create a fairly sophisticated web application that starts to use some of the more advanced software architecture techniques.
Module 3 - Promises, Ajax, and Custom Directives
-Welcome to module 3! In this module, we go over a lot of essential features of AngularJS. We will start with learning about the Promise API. While Promises are essential to Angular, this topic reaches far beyond Angular. It’s really an essential topic to understanding modern web development with Javascript. We will also learn about making calls to the server through the built in Angular service called the HTTP service. We’ll finish off the module by spending a considerable amount of time on THE crown feature of AngularJS: directives. Directives are really at the core of the entire framework. They not only allow us to extend the functionality of existing HTML elements, which is already pretty amazing in an of itself, but they also allow us to create our own element with custom view and custom behavior. Pretty exciting stuff!
Module 4 - Components, Events, Modules, and Routing
-In this module, we start by introducing the idea of Component-based architecture. We will then delve into the AngularJS component API. The component API is something that was just recently added into Angular 1 and it’s not only supposed to improve your application through the use of Component-based architecture, but also prepare you for an upgrade to Angular version 2, which uses components almost exclusively. We will then learn about the AngularJS event system and how to split up our application into smaller modules that can then be glued together to produce our final application. We’ll finish off the module by diving fairly deep into Routing between views in your application and, specifically, into the use of the ui-router module, which is one of the most popular open source routing solutions within the AngularJS ecosystem. In fact, it’s so popular that even the main Google documentation for routing in Angular links to ui-router. Routing is a very important topic. Without it, your Single Page Application is stuck displaying just 1 view, without an elegant way to display other views.
Module 5 - Form Validation, Testing, and Restaurant Site Development
-Welcome to module 5! This is the last module in the course. We’ll start this module by learning just how easy it is to validate forms with Angular. We will then delve into unit testing our AngularJS code. We will go over how to set up tests for every type of major Angular artifact: controller, service, directive, and component, as well as how to test services that access the network through the HTTP service. However, the last part of the module is the most fun. We will take the site that was developed for our real client in my previous course and re-write the entire thing using AngularJS. However, the coding fun doesn’t have to stop there. After you finish the required part of the course, you can move on to the optional bonus part where we take our newly developed AngularJS application and enhance with it even more features that will allow the restaurant owners to administer their own data. We’ll go over setting up authentication, editing restaurant menu items, uploading menu item pictures and so on.