JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

A few days back I blogged about the query options supported by ASP.NET Web API OData. Though we get a number of options to query data from clients through REST-based URLs, building the URLs at runtime is not an easy task. One of the very popular ways to call services from rich JavaScript applications is through jQuery AJAX. While jQuery AJAX abstracts the pain of dealing with browser and configuring parameters, it expects an absolute URL. Writing a set of fixed URLs can be easy, but in larger applications we will have a number of scenarios where we need to build most part of an OData URL based on decisions. We can’t inspect any of the URLs unless a request is sent to them. It would be good to have an abstraction that generates the queries for us. 

Breeze JS is the right library in such case. Breeze is built with OData query standards. But it is not limited to querying OData. Breeze can manage complex object graphs, cache data, query cached local objects, save complex objects to server, and perform validations and more. Breeze solves all the problems that one might face while working with data in rich JavaScript applications. In this post, we will see how Breeze simplifies querying OData services. 

Building Single Page Applications aka. SPA is something that has become more popular this days. We can find a series of astute client-side JavaScript libraries helping us out to solve the most common tasks. KnockoutJS, AngularJS, DurandalJS and BreezJS are frameworks that we would recommend you to take a closer look into.

All of those frameworks delivers a wide range of functionality to solve time consuming issues such as dependency tracking, binding and associating DOM elements to objects and templating.

In this blogpost we show you how you can publish, subscribe updates via a simple RealtimeMVC controller using XSockets.NET. The controller has a dependency to a simple domain model and EntityFramework.

As stated in previous post, Breeze required data.js for to understand OData conventions. All functions performing CRUD operations in Breeze return a Q promise. Any changes made to properties of $scope inside then method of Q are not watched automatically by Angular, as Q is a non-angular component. To make the changes visible, we need to explicitly call $scope.$apply(). To avoid this difficulty, Breeze team created an extension to convert Q to$q. Name of the extension is to$q, it can be found on GitHub. 

We don’t need jQuery anymore as Breeze detects presence of Angular and configures its AJAX adapter to use $http.

As both Angular and Breeze are JavaScript libraries, they can be easily used together. But we can’t enjoy the usage unless we follow the architectural constraints of Angular JS. The moment we include Breeze.js in an HTML page, the JS object “breeze” is available in the global scope. It can be used directly in any of the JavaScript components, Angular controllers and services are no exceptions. Best way to use an object in any Angular component is through Dependency Injection. 

Zza! is a single page application for ordering pizzas, salads and drinks.

This is the 100% JavaScript version of Zza! written for Node.js running Express with a MongoDB database.

It's built on the BMEAN stack:

Breeze   client-side data modeling and data accessMongo   server-side document-oriented databaseExpress   server-side web application framework on nodeAngular   client-side presentation frameworkNode   server-side platform for web applications

Breeze works well with Microsoft technologies as we've demonstrated many times. It also works well outside the Microsoft ecosystem. To drive that point home, this sample has ...