AngularJS Tricks

AngularJS CAN BE Fun!

For: AngularJS v1.x

1. AngularJS Developers quickly discover that their med-large apps are buckling under the weight of scattered $watch's and the often bloated crutch known as $scope.
2. Keep your $scope free of excess UI state, try limit the size & depth of your overall hierarchy.

2-way data binding: 2-way Sword

2-way binding alone makes coming from other frameworks like Backbone, well, frickin amazeballs.

The problem is: many sites chronically overuse Angular’s design patterns. This leads to directive sprawl and a $scope/rootScope which easily has 1000’s of instances, and can cling to huge objects preventing any hope of effective garbage collection.

You know where this is going: an exhausted browser! Forever doomed to work at a frantic pace executing endless and redundant UI/DOM re-compiles.

Stop OVER-Angular.JSification

“If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.”

• old adage

Does your app have a problem with directives?

current-user-status-label
  div(ng-if='loggedIn')
    view-user-surplusage(ng-if='!editMode')
      .head: contact-details(user='user')
      .tool: contact-buttons(loggedIn='loggedIn')
      a.edit-icon(ng-click='editMode = true')
    edit-user-surplusage(ng-if='editMode')
      .head: avatar-edit(user='user')
      .body: edit-contact-details(user='user')
      a.save-icon(ng-click='editMode = false')

Let’s design a flexible user-widget which helps:

1. Versatile componentization w/ DRY Angular code
2. Understandable directives, with minimal directive size/depth (mind your ng-repeats)
3. Simple Service Layer
4. Little actual coding to implement - just HTML/View Code

// jade
user-widget
  div(ng-if='loggedIn')
    div.edit(ng-if='editMode')
      h4.email-icon: input(type='email', ng-model='user.email')
      h4.phone-icon: input(type='email', ng-model='user.phone')
      a.save-icon(ng-click='editMode = false')
    div.show(ng-if='!editMode')
      h1.users-icon {{ user.name  }}
      h4.email-icon {{ user.email }}
      h4.phone-icon {{ user.phone }}
      a.edit-icon(ng-click='editMode = true')
  div(ng-if='!loggedIn')
    h5: i Welcome User
    a.btn(href='/login') Login

Solutions

Angular Tips

1. Use 1-way binding ( e.g. { :: title } )
2. Limit recursive nesting of directives
3. And if you must nest directives, NEVER do so inside an ng-repeat - Performance will start to mirror something like O(n^2)^3 ;) I. Use native JS/DOM code in a factory pattern to create basic DOM/UI fragments, examples: Modal msg box, status bar. Call UI factories from either directives or controllers.
4. Bonus: Understand cost and triggers of browser render lifecycle: animation, composite rendering, reflows

Use Browserify to Organize Project

Not specifically for Angular per-se, but essential for simple dependency resolution.

Browserify makes JS projects managable with virtually no added code overhead (ok, a few 100 chars).

Just read this section of the Browserify Handbook.

Alternatives

ReactJS from Facebook

If you have tons of small reusable UI components - ReactJS might be a better choice:

• If your project…?:
  • Has a different philosophy to UI/DOM implementation than Angular
  • Already has some kind of ‘framework’ - You can use ReactJS alongside AngularJS, Ember, Backbone. (Avoid if possible though).
  • Handles frequent data model changes in it’s own code, you’ll benefit by avoiding the ADHD-nature of digest/loop pattern in Angular

Polymer Project from Google

Pure-er JS Approach

• By the way, here’s where I try create framework agnostic code (+1 testability, +1 reuse)
  1. Use plain javascript class to load data (AJAX/JSONP/Embedded in page, et al.)
  2. Use mustache templating to create HTML strings (or DOM directly)
  3. Cache rendered content in localStorage if you can
  4. (Optional) Now add an event listener to re-render the content. I have standardized on the event name refresh.<class-name>