JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Node devs tend to be minimalists, DIY’ers, Lego™ artists, if you will. We want a nice set of tools and pieces at our disposal that we can compose into whatever creation we imagine.

If you’ve bought into Node’s small module paradigm, stuff like Ember, Angular, and even jQuery can feel a bit like excessively large Duplo™ blocks.

To be clear, this doesn’t make them bad. I’m glad they exist. Clearly, they empower scores of developers to create some great things on the frontend.

Of course we think Ampersand modules are a great match for building frontends for our Node applications. But for Ampersand we use the term “framework” very loosely. As demonstrated by how people are using it, it’s really is just a loosely coupled set of tools.

In the end, the only constant in our field is change. We simply cannot, in good conscience, assert that any single toolset (even our own) is the only valid approach. It’s just not how we think development should work.

JavaScript expert Tal Gleichger compares and contrasts the four most popular UI frameworks for creating hybrid applications - Ionic, Famo.us, F7, and Onsen.

Contents:

• 1 Introduction
• 2 What is a hybrid application?
  • 3 UI Frameworks
• 3.1 Ionic Framework
• 3.2 Famo.us + AngularJS
• 3 FrameWork 7
• 4 OnsenUI
• 5 Material Design
• 6 Conclusion

• Mobile First
• Responsive Design
• Semantic Markup
• Flexible Styles
• Accelerated Animations
• Extensible Configuration
• Scalable Spacing
• Reusable Code
• Progressive Enhancement
• Graceful Degradation
• Stable Codebase

Nowadays, we have countless Javascript libraries available for us to use. Every once in a while we get a new framework/library for Javascript. I’ve used many Javascript frameworks, but I’ve never seen something as simple and flexible as Vue.js.

You’ll be amazed by how a few lines you need to write to accomplish common tasks in Javascript with Vue.js.

The Flexbox Layout officially called CSS Flexible Box Layout Module is new layout module in CSS3 made to improve the items align, directions and order in the container even when they are with dynamic or even unknown size. The prime characteristic of the flex container is the ability to modify the width or height of its children to fill the available space in the best possible way on different screen sizes.

Many designers and developers find this flexbox layout easier to use, as positioning of the elements is simpler thus more complex layouts can be achieved with less code, leading to simpler development process. Flexbox layout algorithm is direction based unlike the block or inline layout which are vertically and horizontally based. This flexbox layout should be used for small application components, while new CSS Grid Layout Module is emerging to handle the large scale layouts.

Rather that explaining how the flex properties work, this guide will focus on how the flex properties affect the layout in a visual way.

Users notice if sites and apps don't run well, so optimizing rendering performance is crucia!

To write performant sites and apps you need to understand how HTML, JavaScript and CSS is handled by the browser, and ensure that the code you write (and the other 3rd party code you include) runs as efficiently as possible.

As much as we all love CSS and Javascript frameworks, like Foundation for Websites, we know that these frameworks were built to be the base of a Website and the Web has changed. Since we have more Apps and fewer Websites being built these frameworks just aren’t enough anymore. They weren’t built to handle full-blown one page apps and so they have their issues when it comes to that.

Then came Foundation for Apps that intends to fill the void we currently have in these frameworks by adding a completely new grid and harvesting the power of Angular to make our job a whole lot easier.

Planning a front-end web application is about more than just picking a few JavaScript solutions to aid in the architecture and testing of a web application. While this might be where much of the front-end community focuses, seasoned developers know that building enterprise-grade software is much more than this.

In this article, I am going to describe 16 steps that front-end developers should go through when planning a front-end web application. These steps aim to cover the entire life-cycle of a front-end application. However, before diving in, I need to clarify a few front-end terms that remain unsettled in the industry.

Flexbox is an efficient and flexible way to manage probably all types of layouts. It provides almost no time gap between initially wrong and correctly laid out layout look. In JavaScript solution case it takes time to download the document, then to download the corresponding JS file, and, if there are any, download images in the blocks. Flexbox is instant and JavaScript takes seconds. Even so, this JavaScript case is perfect for people who use older browsers that do not support Flexbox.

Imagine for a second the fact that, five years ago, we already had frameworks like jQuery to play with, and while not as functional and feature rich as today – it was already possible to configure and play with the web in hardly imaginable ways.

Today, there are literally hundreds of thousands of frameworks available to anyone who is brave enough to learn something new. Yes, most of them play very tiny role in the collective evolution of web development, but even that tiny contribution counts.

Front-end is not just about HTML & CSS, it involves creativity just as much as it involves writing code in JavaScript, PHP, Python or any other programming language of your choice.

Have a look at my post on the top web programming languages in 2014 – if you’ve been following the trend, it will not be hard to see that most of those languages have held the top spot for over a decade.

I’m sure you know a lot of this stuff already, but it doesn’t hurt to refresh your memory and bask in a little bit of nostalgia from time to time. If you think that I didn’t mention your favorite framework because I hate you: surprisingly, you’d be right!

* AuraJS
* Kraken
* min.js
* Reactive Coffee
* Responsive
* scaleApp
* skelJS
* Spine
* Stapes.js