Category: Javascript

Exploring Meteor JS

I studied meteor.js for about 10-12 hours last weekend.

Sharing my impressions:
FAST DEVELOPMENT – if it can work for your project, you can develop in maybe half the time as say angular/django or django by itself even.  Maybe even faster than that.  Seriously.  Watch the short screencast on their home page to get a feel for it:  https://www.meteor.com/
Basically it mirrors a lot of the datastore in the client and seamlessly keeps the two in sync.  So you don’t have to worry as a developer about the backend as much – no writing api endpoints, no writing the code gluing front and back together, etc.  Validation code can be written once and used both client and server side.  Cool latency compensation. User accounts already plug and play – no big hassle getting that set up, one liner and you are good to go, which is sweet time saver.  Community contribs get you CRUD admin with a one liner, and reactive forms that save a lot of work.  Read full list on their front page of cool features.
short learning curve – it is easy to learn and would be ideal for situations like BCF’s where we need to get student programmers up to speed quick.
Based on Mongo – this is part of why it is fast dev.  But also the big down point.  Schema free document store for persistence makes things go faster in dev, but you really have to know your use cases, queries needed, etc up front.  In some ways it is not as amenable to change as a relational data store (in other ways it is totally pliable).  And can have issues with relational integrity.
See http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never-use-mongodb/ but understand there are lots of valuable retorts in the comments and elsewhere.
Meteor is not at 1.0 yet.  And they are adding support for other backends, like MySQL is likely usable now, and will get even more robust quickly.  I think another 6 months and meteor is going to be getting huge attention when they release 1.0.
The ecosystem is surprisingly extensive with tons of community contributions.  As extensive as angular’s it seemed to me.
And there is a good book on it here https://www.discovermeteor.com/

Towards Getting Drupal’s WebForms Functionality in Angular JS

Drupal Webforms (https://drupal.org/project/webform) lets power users create their own forms through a web interface, choosing the types, labels, number, etc. of fields they want.  It then can present the form to final end users to fill out, and collects the data in the database.  Admins can then view the results tabularized online or download as CSV.

I want to see the same available for a Angular / Django stack.

Already someone has form generation from simple json descriptions – this being a tool to make form code faster to write for developers:
Someone else has started on form creation by users:  this app allows users to spec out their forms and then it generates most of the angular code for the form:
By most, I think it does not yet handle saving the form to your server database.
Which makes sense as that would vary by backend.
Perhaps even better, another similar effort but with drag and drop to build bootstrap forms:
Either of these would be excellent open source projects to contribute to if any student devs are looking for cool stuff to do in their free time.
Drupal Webform has one maybe “fault” – it saves results from one form submission all together in the database as one results field – as a long string of concatenated key/value pairs.  Probably this is ok, maybe even best approach – you could still make the admin table of results sortable and filterable by just doing that fully on the client side.
So to get to Webforms, above needs to extended – add autogeneration to include code to send json of results to django database via restangular and django rest frameworks api/deserializer and then front end admin interface so that admins can have a tabular view of all submissions and then an option to download those submissions as CSV.  So for the admin view you would just throw them into an ng-grid (http://angular-ui.github.io/ng-grid/) or better yet it would be nice to try ng-table http://bazalt-cms.com/ng-table/ which has download as CSV already built in.

Angular JS tree view / drag n drop status

hmm, so treeview situation with Angular vastly improved.

first, not angular, but tempting because it already works well with remote data json src, and has drag and drop even between treeviews – which I was hunting for to see if already done by someone:
hmmm, would prefer angular of course, before there was only this:
https://github.com/eu81273/angular.treeview  which I have used and it is ok given nothing else already plug and play out there…
but just now I found this:
hubba hubba…
and it has between trees drag and drop! try it out  –>  http://jimliu.github.io/angular-ui-tree/trees.html
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