JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

When you start to dig deep into the differences between a single-page application and an ASP.NET Master Page implementation, you start to realize that they actually are more similar to each other than different - being that a single-page application is simply a shell page to house content pages just like a master page, except that the shell page in a single-page application does not reload or execute like a master page does with each new page request.

Perhaps the name Single-Page Application is an unfortunate name  that may lead you to believe that the technology is not an appropriate choice for building web-based applications that need to scale to an enterprise-wide application that may consist of several hundred content web pages with thousands of users.

The goal of this article is to develop a single-page application that can be implemented with hundreds of content pages with all the functionality that an enterprise application needs to support thousands of users, including authentication, authorization and session state etc.

It’s probably important you have at least a high level picture what an SPA architecture looks like now that there is quite a bit more design work involved on the client side especially with more and more implementations are around SPA and patterns like MVVM; so hence this post. Obviously there is no such thing as one size fits all especially when it comes to architecture, so feel free to omit or add to the architecture based on your specific needs.

Client Layer (HTML5 Browser)
Model View ViewModel (MVVM) is a design pattern which helps developers separate the Model (the data) from the View (the UI). The View-Model part of MVVM is responsible for exposing the data objects from the Model in such a way that those objects are easily consumed in the View. Kendo MVVM is an implementation of the MVVM pattern which seamlessly integrates with the rest of the Kendo framework (widgets and DataSource).

Web Layer (Server)
Almost the entire ASP.NET MVC Web Layer can leverage the DI & IoC Pattern, you can read up on what the benefits are and how to do this download both a sample MVC app that uses MEF or Unity 3 from one of my previous post.

Generate a web app instantly, directly from a database (SQL Server)

The following sample application code is an alternative to using libraries such AngularJS, Knockout, etc. Only established libraries jQuery and boostrap are used in conjunction with JavaScript, HTML and CSS.
A very simple approach is used in overlaying iframes or objects and jQuery Post routines & JSON, to read and update the database, without any postback.
The Grid and Detail forms included in this application also contain simple CSS, to make them automatically resize to any mobile device, down to iPhone, etc. Using horizontal and vertical scrolling or swiping allows the user to quickly read all data columns and rows in a Grid.

Looking for an easy way to kick-start your Angular app development in under a minute? Now you can with HotTowel.Angular, a free NuGet package (and soon to become a Bower package too). What do you get? Let’s take a look …