AngularJS: HTML the way You Want It

Call it “single page” or “rich client”, but modern web applications have advanced far beyond the “click this link and wait for the page to render” approach. Clients demand that pages react immediately to the user: no waiting allowed. Frameworks like jQuery and Backbone may let you manage the DOM and respond to events … but AngularJS goes far past that: it lets you seamlessly marry your data objects, controllers, and the UI together gracefully and naturally … or create your own HTML elements or attributes as needed. Rather than work with HTML the way the W3C provides it, you can create the markup you want.

AngularJS, by Google, describes itself as a “Superheroic JavaScript MVW Framework” (that's “Model-View-Whatever”). AngularJS is about freedom: freedom from the annoyances related to working directly with the DOM (even through a layer of jQuery or Backbone), and freedom to define your own HTML vocabulary and make it Just Work. It reworks HTML to make dynamic views normal and natural, and was designed with interoperability, extensibility, and testability as top priorities.

We'll cover the basics of setting up a page with AngularJS and delve into its core concepts: templates, bindings, scopes, controllers, routing, partial templates, and its dependency injection framework. From there we'll discuss communication with the server as well as how to extend AngularJS.

About Howard Lewis Ship

Howard Lewis Ship is the original creator of the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over fifteen years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard has been developing financial and e-commerce applications in 100% Clojure since 2012.

Howard currently works for Wal-Mart's Global E-Commerce division. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his children, Jacob and Olivia.

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