jberet-ui: A JavaScript repository from amoscatelli

Getting Started

You must have node.js and its package manager (npm) installed.
You can get them from http://nodejs.org/.

Install Dependencies

We have two kinds of dependencies in this project: tools and angular framework code. The tools help us manage and test the application.

We get the tools we depend upon via npm, the [node package manager][npm].
We get the angular code via bower, a [client-side code package manager][bower].

We have preconfigured npm to automatically run bower so we can simply do:

npm install

Behind the scenes this will also call bower install. You should find that you have two new folders in your project.

node_modules - contains the npm packages for the tools we need
app/bower_components - contains the angular framework files

Note that the bower_components folder would normally be installed in the root folder but this location was changed through the .bowerrc file. Putting it in the app folder makes it easier to serve the files by a webserver.

Configure the Application

Users need to configure the URL for connecting the the backend JBeret REST API. It can be done in one of the following ways, in order of precedence:

Pass it as gulp argument, for example, gulp --restUrl http://localhost:8080/myapp/api/
Configure it in ./config.json
Set environment variable, for example,
- In bash/sh/ksh: export JBERET_REST_URL="http://localhost:8080/restAPI/api", or add to ~/.profile so it's always available when opening a new terminal.
- In csh/tcsh: setenv JBERET_REST_URL "http://localhost:8080/restAPI/api", or add to ~/.cshrc or ~/.tcshrc so it's always available when opening a new terminal.
- In Windows: set JBERET_REST_URL="http://localhost:8080/restAPI/api", or add to Control Panel environment variable so it's always available when opening a new terminal.
If all the above fails, the default value /api is used.

The javascript file ./common/batchRestService.js contains a replacement token for the REST API URL, which is substituted with real value during gulp build process. The final javascript is in ./dist/bundle.js.

Build, Assembly and Run the Application

Running command gulp, or gulp serve, or npm start in project root directory will serve the app, watch any updates and automatically refresh browser. The browser will automatically open at http://localhost:3000.

gulp tasks include:

default: default to start task
serve: build, watch, and start browser-sync server
serve-only: start browser-sync server without build step
build: build the app, including steps like lint, js, css, html, font, img
lint: check quality of js and css
jshint: lint task for js
csslint: lint task for css
js: combine all javascript files including all transitive dependencies, minify and bundle into dist/bundle.js
css: combine all css files, minify and bundle into dist/css/bundle.css
img: optimize all image files and place them in dist/img
html: copy all html files into appropriate directories under dist/
font: copy all required font files into appropriate directories under dist/
clean: delete dist/

Testing

There are two kinds of tests: Unit tests and End to End tests.

Running Unit Tests

Unit tests are written in [Jasmine][jasmine], which we run with the [Karma Test Runner][karma]. We provide a Karma configuration file to run them.

the configuration is found at karma.conf.js
the unit tests are found next to the code they are testing and are named as ..._test.js.

The easiest way to run the unit tests is to use the supplied npm script:

npm test

This script will start the Karma test runner to execute the unit tests. Moreover, Karma will sit and watch the source and test files for changes and then re-run the tests whenever any of them change. This is the recommended strategy; if your unit tests are being run every time you save a file then you receive instant feedback on any changes that break the expected code functionality.

You can also ask Karma to do a single run of the tests and then exit. This is useful if you want to check that a particular version of the code is operating as expected. The project contains a predefined script to do this:

npm run test-single-run

End to end testing

End-to-end tests are also written in [Jasmine][jasmine]. These tests are run with the [Protractor][protractor] End-to-End test runner. It uses native events and has special features for Angular applications.

the configuration is found at e2e-tests/protractor-conf.js
the end-to-end tests are found in e2e-tests/scenarios.js

Protractor simulates interaction with our web app and verifies that the application responds correctly. Therefore, our web server needs to be serving up the application, so that Protractor can interact with it.

npm start

In addition, since Protractor is built upon WebDriver we need to install this. This project comes with a predefined script to do this:

npm run update-webdriver

This will download and install the latest version of the stand-alone WebDriver tool.

Once you have ensured that the development web server hosting our application is up and running and WebDriver is updated, you can run the end-to-end tests using the supplied npm script:

npm run protractor

This script will execute the end-to-end tests against the application being hosted on the development server.

Updating Angular

The angular framework library code and tools are acquired through package managers (npm and bower) you can use these tools instead to update the dependencies.

You can update the tool dependencies by running:

npm update

This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the package.json file.

You can update the Angular dependencies by running:

bower update

This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the bower.json file.

Loading Angular Asynchronously

This project supports loading the framework and application scripts asynchronously. The special index-async.html is designed to support this style of loading. For it to work you must inject a piece of Angular JavaScript into the HTML page. The project has a predefined script to help do this.

npm run update-index-async

This will copy the contents of the angular-loader.js library file into the index-async.html page. You can run this every time you update the version of Angular that you are using.

Serving the Application Files

While angular is client-side-only technology and it's possible to create angular webapps that don't require a backend server at all, we recommend serving the project files using a local webserver during development to avoid issues with security restrictions (sandbox) in browsers. The sandbox implementation varies between browsers, but quite often prevents things like cookies, xhr, etc to function properly when an html page is opened via file:// scheme instead of http://.

Running the App during Development

This project uses browser-sync to serve the app, watch any updates and automatically refresh browser. Running gulp with default task, or gulp servetask will start it. gulp serve task builds the whole app and assemble it under /dist directory.

Note that this command will block the terminal. To stop browser-sync, just press Ctrl-C.

/Users/cfang/dev/jsr352/jberet-ui > gulp

npm start command is configured to just call gulp, so npm start is equivalent to gulp command.

This project also comes preconfigured with a local development webserver. It is a node.js tool called [http-server][http-server]. You can start this webserver with npm start but you may choose to install the tool globally:

sudo npm install -g http-server

Then you can start your own development web server to serve static files from a folder by running:

http-server -a localhost -p 8000

Alternatively, you can choose to configure your own webserver, such as apache or nginx. Just configure your server to serve the files under the dist/ directory.

Running the App in Production

This really depends on how complex your app is and the overall infrastructure of your system, but the general rule is that all you need in production are all the files under the dist/ directory. Everything else should be omitted.

Angular apps are really just a bunch of static html, css and js files that just need to be hosted somewhere they can be accessed by browsers.

If your Angular app is talking to the backend server via xhr or other means, you need to figure out what is the best way to host the static files to comply with the same origin policy if applicable. Usually this is done by hosting the files by the backend server or through reverse-proxying the backend server(s) and webserver(s).