Hands-on Angular.js with Backlift part 1: Views and Controllers | Hacker News Reader

Hands-on Angular.js with Backlift part 1: Views and Controllers

blog.backlift.com

65 pointscolevscode9 comments

This is a really nice way to plug your product. :) Writing web applications where the server is just a RESTful api that handles authorization makes a lot of sense. Clean separation between models and views, easy to deploy almost anywhere and easy to scale and cache. I've been using flask-restless to accomplish something similar, but there is still some glue code you need and sql to define database models.

Though it seems your collection api does not support arbitrary queries yet? E.g. you can't fetch the last 10 blog posts or the highest rated comments by user X? That are imho must have features for anything more than the most basic web application.

Uniqueness validation seem to be missing too. E.g. currently no way to say to a user that "a user with that username already exists"?

Uniqueness validation is built into the collections API. If you attempt to add a model with a duplicate ID you'll get a 400 error. In addition you can specify validation rules in the config.yml file. Some additional info here: http://backlift.github.com/docs/validation.html#validation-r....

As for query parameters on the collections API, we totally agree it's a must and we're working on it.

I saw this quote on stack overflow that best summarize my experience with Angular: in angular the easy stuff is really easy and the advanced stuff seem disproportionally hard.

A quote that would be best served with an example....

Well, bi-directional data-bind is really easy. There is really minimum code needs to be written. But when you need to create a reusable directive (widget in Angular), it's hard to even find out where to start. You might need to write many lines of boilerplate configuration code that takes quite a while to learn and understand. In contrast, when you need to create a reusable widget in Backbone, you can just write a view class like any other view class. To be fair, it is in Angular team's plan to simplify directive development, so that it will be like writing just another controller.

There's definitely a little more work involved in directives. I don't think there's much boilerplate in writing them though. There's certainly more work in understanding how they work initially, but that's a small price to pay for the reusability they give you.

I agree. At first glance there's a lot of shorthand (@, =, ^, ?, &) but that knowledge comes with time. I experienced a lot of confusion with the compile() and link() functions that I feel could have been prevented with better docs. Until that's done, I recommend the path I took: lots of experimenting and watching John Lindquist's videos over on egghead.io.

I'm just learning myself but looking at others code helps, you might find the UI library helpful as there are lots of directives and filters

https://github.com/angular-ui/angular-ui#readme

Also Google 'ben nadel angularjs directives' and he provides numerous examples. Good luck!

setTimeout(0), baby!

Angular is cool, but also a bit crazy. Seriously... who even thinks of doing something like that as a replacement for setters?

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