Try AngularJS Development: Beginner’s Guide to use it

Hi there! Don’t you want to know something about awesome AngularJS and how it works? We have prepared the most interesting materials for you and have selected a list of questions that you should like. For those who are just starting to learn this framework, we will try to explain what this technology gives you and what benefits it brings. Well, let’s get started.

AngularJS is an open source JavaScript framework. Designed for the development of single page applications. Its goal is to extend MVC-based browser applications and make testing and development easier. The framework works with HTML, which contains additional custom attributes that are described by directives, and binds the input or output of a page region to a model, which is regular JavaScript variables. The values of these variables are set manually or retrieved from static or dynamic JSON data. Declarative programming is used to describe the interface and the business logic is separated from the interface code, which improves the testability and extensibility of applications. Another distinguishing feature of the framework is two-way binding, which allows you to dynamically change data in one place in the interface when changing model data in another. This way AngularJS keeps the model and view in sync. In addition, AngularJS supports functionality such as Ajax, DOM manipulation, animation, templates, routing, and so on. The power of the framework, the presence of rich functionality has largely influenced the fact that it finds its use in an increasing number of web applications, being at the moment probably one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks.

Getting started with AngularJS:

Let’s see what AngularJS Development is. To do this, we need the files of the framework itself, so we will download the library itself from the link on the official website. There you can find the source files themselves, tutorials and other accompanying materials regarding the library.
When downloading the zip package, we will find in it, in addition to the library itself (angular.js), a number of additional files and their minimized versions:

angular-touch.js: provides touch screen support
angular-animate.js: provides animation functionality
angular-aria.js: provides support for aria-attributes (accesible rich internet application)
angular-mocks.js: provides mocks for unit testing
angular-route.js: provides a routing mechanism
angular-sanitize.js: provides functionality for managing potentially unsafe content (JavaScript, html)
angular-cookies.js: provides functionality for managing cookies
angular-loader.js: used to load AngularJS scripts
angular-messages.js: provides functionality for displaying messages
angular-resource.js: Provides functionality for working with resources
i18n folder: contains JS files for different locales.
Of all the loaded scripts in the archive, we will be primarily interested in the angular.min.js file.

Now let’s create the actual application. It will be the default HelloWorld. You will see the actual code of the html page. The first thing that probably jumps out at you is the new attributes added to the standard html tags (in this case ng-app and ng-model). These attributes are directives of the AngularJS framework. By embedding them, the framework allows you to add specific behaviors to elements. In this particular case, the ng-app directive declares the <html> element to be the root element for the entire application, and the ng-model directive specifies the “name” model to which the value of the input element will be bound. And when the text in the input element changes, the “name” model will also dynamically change its value. Below in the <h1> Welcome {{name}}! </h1> element, the value of this model is displayed.
And then you can just open this file in a browser and test its work.

Maybe you will ask yourself Why AngularJS? HTML is great for declaring static documents, but it falters when we try to use it for declaring dynamic views in web-applications. AngularJS lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application. The resulting environment is extraordinarily expressive, readable, and quick to develop. AngularJS is a toolset for building the framework most suited to your application development. It is fully extensible and works well with other libraries. Every feature can be modified or replaced to suit your unique development workflow and feature needs.

Best features of AngularJS:

Data binding. Data-binding is an automatic way of updating the view whenever the model changes, as well as updating the model whenever the view changes. This is awesome because it eliminates DOM manipulation from the list of things you have to worry about.
Controller. AngularJS lets you express the behavior in a clean readable form without the usual boilerplate of updating the DOM, registering callbacks or watching model changes.
Unlike other frameworks, there is no need to inherit from proprietary types in order to wrap the model in accessors methods. AngularJS models are plain old JavaScript objects. This makes your code easy to test, maintain, reuse, and again free from boilerplate.
Form validation, Client-side form validation is an important part of a great user experience. AngularJS lets you declare the validation rules of the form without having to write JavaScript code. Write less code, go have beer sooner.
Testable. AngularJS was designed from ground up to be testable. It encourages behavior-view separation, comes pre-bundled with mocks, and takes full advantage of dependency injection. It also comes with an end-to-end scenario runner which eliminates test flakiness by understanding the inner workings of AngularJS.

Conclusion

AngularJS has become an amazing combination of low barriers to entry and rich feature set. It will take about an hour of free time to start writing small applications in it. At the same time, it will take months to learn and use all of the features. AngularJS is by far the most popular framework supported by guys at Google. Besides the rich standard library, many custom extensions have been written for the Angular. Try it, Use it, Enjoy it. Good luck!