tutorial

My $scope Is Not Your Dumping Ground

This little problem came up in my recent AngularJS/Ionic app. It all started with an innocent modal dialog. There are several, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s look at the login dialog: The generic dialog plumbing is a div with a surrounding overlay that dims out the rest of the screen. You can click … Read More

AngularJS & Ionic: CSS Library Selection

Aaron Mulder reviews several mobile CSS frameworks – JQuery Mobile, TopCoat, Bootstrap and Ionic – for a side project. Check out his criteria and selection.

JavaScript's Odd Parts – Configurable Functions as a DSL

As some of you may be moving from Java to JavaScript, you’ll find there are a number of ways to program – using objects, functions, or a hybrid approach. A common style of API you’ll see in the wild lends itself to expressive object definitions, while at the same time being easy to use to … Read More

Converting a Java Spring application to Scala

Supposedly Scala requires a completely different programming style. But what happens when you just want a Spring application? Is it possible to program in Scala without jumping in the deep end? Chariot’s John Shepard illustrates the difference in approach in this quick tutorial.

AngularJS Corner – The ngMock and ngMockE2E libraries

AngularJS provides two powerful mock and test support modules, both contained in a single script file. The modules, ngMock and ngMockE2E, provide different features for different purposes, though both modules are defined in, angular-mocks.js. In this post I’ll explain the differences between the modules and how they get mounted in a test scenario.

AngularJS Corner – Using promises and $q to handle asynchronous calls

A number of Angular services return promises: $http, $interval, $timeout, for example. Anything needing to run in the background will need to coordinate with a caller such as a controller or directive, and the promise API is the way to go. But how does it work? We’ll show you how with this short tutorial.

Getting Chatty with Angular, Socket.IO, Node/Express and Bootstrap

Now that we’re well into the client/server age of the web with client-side frameworks such as AngularJS and Ember, it’s time to start revisiting those typical sample projects and reviewing how they’ll change with a more intelligent client. In this tutorial we’ll wire up an AngularJS single-page web application to communicate with Web Sockets using Socket.IO and host the application using NodeJS for an all-Javascript stack.

JavaScript's Modern Tools – Grunt – Ant for the Browser?

In our prior JavaScript build tools posts, we already discussed bower and npm, two tools that help you download and install dependencies. But what about tools to build your application, run tests, distribute minified versions and run quality checks? Enter Grunt.

Order Out Of Chaos – Maintaining ordered processing of messages in AKKA actors

The reactive paradigm is a wonderful thing. The basic idea is that a reactive application, as much as possible, is asynchronous from beginning to end. It should be event driven, fault tolerant, scalable and responsive. Writing an asynchronous application, however, has it’s own set of unique challenges. In this post I’ll demonstrate an approach we took to solve the challenge of maintaining a definite order, specifically when performing database updates in asynchronous code within an actor.

Twilio SMS Receive – Crazy Simple

Twilio is a cloud based service that enables you to programmatically make and receive phone calls and SMS messages using their simple API. We’ll see how to receive and send SMS messages using Twilio and a simple Django app.