JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Topics for web, mobile design and development.

Really well fed Blog with a Collection on free Tutorials and News Panels for the Front-End Developer.

underscore – going the functional route

Why: JavaScript is a functional language but its standard libraries miss a lot of the functional goodies we are used to from other languages. Here underscore comes to the rescue.

when.js – lightweight concurrency

Why: Concurrency is hard. Callbacks can get out of hand pretty quickly even more so when they are nested. Promises make writing and reading concurrency code simpler.

require.js – modules (re)loaded

Why: Your scripts need to be in modules, cleanly separated from each other. If you don’t have an asset pipeline want to load your modules asynchronously or just want to manage your modules from your JavaScript require.js is for you.

bower – packages managed

Why: Proper dependency management is a tough nut to crack and it is even harder to be pleasantly used (I am looking at you, maven).

grunt – the worker

Why: Repetitive tasks need to be automated. If you plan to use grunt and bower consider using yeoman which combines both into a workflow.

d3 – visualizations

Why: There are tons of chart or visualization libraries out there but d3 takes a more general approach. It defines a way of thinking, a way of manipulating the document based on data and data alone. It treats the DOM as part of your web application. Your visualization is a part of your document and not just a component you can forget about after creating it. This general approach allows you to create arbitrary visualizations not just charts.

last but not least: jQuery

Why: jQuery is almost ubiquitous and this is not by chance. It provides a great foundation and helps in many common scenarios.

I wanted to try and compare some other popular Javascript MV* frameworks. I am aware that TodoMVC exists for this, but I wanted to implement the same thing (with encrypted local storage) that previously was created with AngularJS.

What to implement:
* Create a view that has a input[type=text] field
* When the user enters some text in the input, encrypt the text and save it in localStorage
* Instantly display the encrypted text and the decrypted text

 

The following code samples seems to do the right thing / achieve the same results. I have just included the code samples here, with a small summary for every frameworks with my own pros and cons.

 

* KnockoutJS
* VanillaJS (simple)
* VanillaJS (MVC style)
* BackboneJS
* EmberJS
* AngularJS