/contacts-app-polymer

Contacts Polymer Demo App with REST API in Express for Node.js

Primary LanguageHTML

Contacts List demo application

This is a demo for implementation part of interview screener.

Demo is currently running at http://contacts.sazel.cz:8080.

Wireframes

Check wireframes for this application here

Project structure

  • bower_components - custom frontend components
  • controllers - backend REST API controllers (currently only users)
  • models - models for MongoDB (currently only User model)
  • node_modules - custom backend components
  • seed - data to be filled for tests
  • src - sources for frontend, Polymer elements
  • test - tests
  • validation - backend validations (currently only users)
  • API.md - REST API documentation
  • app.js - Backend Node.js app
  • bower.json - Configuration for frontend packages
  • index.html - Start point for frontend
  • package.json - Configuration for backend packages
  • MOCKUP.md - Balsamiq mockups of application

Other directories are not that important.

Backend

The backend consists of NoSQL database MongoDB and REST API written in JavaScript running on Node.js.

Requirements and installation

These application packages are required:

For Debian/Ubuntu based distro:

  1. Install MongoDB, Node.js and npm
$ sudo apt-get install nodejs-legacy npm mongodb-server
$ source ~/.profile
  1. Clone repo and cd to it
$ git clone https://github.com/wojta/contacts-app-polymer.git
$ cd contacts-app-polymer
  1. Install node packages using npm
$ npm install

Run tests!

This should also check your connection to MongoDB, app is set to default localhost connection on port 8000 (you can change it in app.js).

$ npm test

If everything is ok, you can start backend.

Start backend

$ npm start

Check out documentation

Documentation is here.

Frontend

You should have already installed backend and I suppose that frontend will be hosted from the same computer.

Installation

  1. Install bowser and Polymer CLI (usually globally - root required, but local should work too)
$ sudo npm install -g bowser
$ sudo npm install -g polymer-cli
  1. Install bower packages
$ cd contacts-app-polymer
$ bower install

Viewing Application

This is mainly for development purposes. Not for production.

$ polymer serve

Building Your Application

This should be suitable even for production.

$ polymer build

This will create a build/ folder with bundled/ and unbundled/ sub-folders containing a bundled (Vulcanized) and unbundled builds, both run through HTML, CSS, and JS optimizers.

You can serve the built versions by giving polymer serve a folder to serve from:

$ polymer serve build/bundled

Changing API URL

By default client uses http://localhost:8000 for accessing backend, so this is suitable only for localhost. To change the URL edit index.html, line with contacts-app element:

<contacts-app app_name="Contacts Demo" rest_url="http://localhost:8000"></contacts-app>