Getting Started with ES6 – The Next Version of JavaScript

  JavaScript has come a long ways in its 20 years of existence. It’s grown from a language used to define a few variables and functions to one that can be used to build robust applications on the client-side and server-side. Although it’s popularity continues to grow in large part due to its dynamic nature and ability to run anywhere, JavaScript as a language is still missing many key features that could help increase developer productivity and provide a more maintainable code base. Fortunately, ECMAScript 6 (ES6) adds many new features that will take the language to the next level. […]

My Thoughts on AngularJS 1.3 and 2.0

I’ve received a ton of questions on Twitter and through email about the AngularJS 2.0 announcement. Questions such as “What’s going on with AngularJS?” and “Should I start a new AngularJS 1.3 project when AngularJS 2.0 looks quite different?”. Many people are excited about the modern approach the Angular team is taking with 2.0, a few seem to be predicting doom and gloom, and a few more are worried about what they should do.  As a result of all the questions I decided to put together a quick post since 140 characters on Twitter isn’t really enough. Stay on 1.3 […]

Cancelling Route Navigation in AngularJS

This post has been updated to cover AngularJS 1.3+. Routing provides a nice way to associate views with controllers in AngularJS using a minimal amount of code. While a user is normally able to navigate directly to a specific route, there may be times when a user triggers a route change before they’ve finalized an important action such as saving data.  In this type of situation you may want to cancel the route navigation and ask the user if they’d like to finish what they were doing so that their data isn’t lost. In another situation the user may try […]

What’s “Right” with AngularJS?

There’s been a lot of discussion today on some email groups I’m involved with about a post titled What’s wrong with Angular.js. I’d recommend reading through the post first before continuing but in a nutshell it makes it sound as if AngularJS isn’t a viable framework and should never be used. It also critiques two-way data binding which I found interesting (and misguided). It’s definitely a controversial post with some comments that made me laugh and others that I agreed with completely or in part. I normally ignore these types of posts but in this case I wanted to address […]

Creating Custom AngularJS Directives Part 7 – Creating a Unique Value Directive using $asyncValidators

Creating Custom AngularJS Directives Series In a previous post I demonstrated how to build a unique value directive to ensure that an email address isn’t already in use before allowing a user to save a form. With changes in AngularJS 1.3+, several new features are available to clean up the previous version of the directive and make it easier to work with. In this post I’ll update the previous post, walk-through some of the new features in a directive called wcUnique, and show how a few of the new features can be applied.  The code shown is part of the […]

Learning AngularJS by Example – The Customer Manager Application

Updated: 9/23/2014 I’m always tinkering around with different ideas and toward the beginning of 2013 decided to build a sample application using AngularJS that I call Customer Manager. The goal of the application is to highlight a lot of the different features offered by AngularJS and demonstrate how they can be used together. I also wanted to make sure that the application was approachable by people new to Angular since I’ve never found overly complex applications great for learning new concepts. The application initially started out small and was used in my AngularJS in 60-ish Minutes video on YouTube but […]