Where this project coming from? Black Door Chat Project Introduction.
Although no host is required, I have deployed this client in: http://black-door-chat.smart-bricks.net.
The most simplistic and minimum UI implementation. Of course, driven by the controller... because I do not expect any complex logic in the View.
Look at the ChatRoomComponent class which is the implementation of RoomView interface.
This component represents the chat room view. As you could see, non of those methods has more than 10 lines of code. It focuses on the html and css instead of the logic under send / disconnect / ping etc... For instance, when the user interacts with the UI, the ui only notifies to controller about this action - nothing more.
onSendMessage(): void {
this.controller.sendMessage();
}And leaves all the responsibility to be managed by the controller.
- Install dependencies
yarn install - Run the server
yarn start
Some developers are not familiar with this kind of approach in relation with MVC pattern. And just ignore the flexibility and reusability gained with this pattern. They though because you are writing Java Script you are in the view layer, as a result, thousands of lines of code in a single method. I am using TypeScript as the main language to modelate the entire application.
In my bast experience, I saw many times we allocate lot of lines of code in the view which strictly depends on the JS framework chosen (in this particular case could be Angular). That means, your Model your View and your Controller depends on the framework (Angular). If the framework changes, chaos comes to our project... hours and hours of refactoring to make it runs again. Even a framework migration EG Angular to React is almost impossible to estimate. Because you have been married with your framework in all aspects of the MVC.
If you think about it, the issue is clear. You assigned a lot of responsibility to your view layer. You have allocated there not only the view but also the Controller (logic) and the Model (dtos / business classes). As a result, lot of code lives under your Angular project (or React or ...) evolve or even migrate it is really hard to do or even impossible. I am not going to enter in onther clear issues such as testing, which turns really commplex, expensive and inefficient.
Just have a look the testing under the MVC project take any *.spec.ts file, did you notice I do not need the UI implementation? I am testing the real behavior of our UI not the UI itself. Of course, if you want to test how the view displays the alert message you will add a test under your view project (angular in my case). But I have just left that for other moment. Actually I do not care about the implementation of the view, I am more interesting to check behaviour. In other words, if the view.displayMessage() method has been called than how this message is implemented (shown to the user). Got the point?
Last but not least, some managers said: "We need to start from the scratch because this tech is old" - Well, I reserve my opinion about the term "old" due to the fact that HTML and JS are old. Isn't it?
I think you are starting from scratch because of your UI design and architecture are rot. One effect of that, you have no visibility about the effort to evolve part of the architecture or migrate to an other UI framework.
You are going to concentrate your effort in a reengineering which is really expensive instead of adding new features.
And because you have the budget, you have a new chance to do that again in a better way - Actually this is really positive. You are a lucky guy!
Let me give you and advise, if you do not want to repeat this mistake, just start with The Reusability Principle in mind. Otherwise ... you will repeat same story again and again and...