Angular2

I'm feeling a little weak on the client side these days so I'm looking into Angular.  I watched Angular 2 Tutorial for Beginners: Learn Angular 2 from Scratch and completed the Tour of Heroes tutorial.

This is a big tutorial.  I spent something like a day on this working half an hour here and an hour there over the course of about 2 weeks.  

There was one little bug in it towards the end, unresolved dependency on angular-in-memory-web-api which can be fixed by running

npm install angular-in-memory-web-api --save

in the project directory.  See Angular2 Tutorial (Tour of Heroes): Cannot find module 'angular2-in-memory-web-api'.

There's a lot to this and so far I only scratched the surface.

Angular reminds me a bit of Tapestry with its use of components made up of templates, CSS and code.

Speaking of components, what ever happened to Web Components?  3 years ago I wrote that within a year all web development was going to be done with web components but I feel like you don't hear much about it these days.

Vaadin

They had a pretty good presentation at Boulder Java User's Group yesterday about Vaadin framework.

This reminded me of a framework I used years ago called ICEFaces with a similar approach of providing access to dynamic, client-side functionality while shielding the developer from having to work directly with JavaScript.  The architecture is very similar to the approach ICEFaces uses, with a JavaScript engine running in the client's browser receiving and processing updates to the DOM from the server-side component.

Vaadin uses GWT.  I played around with GWT a long time ago but it always struck me as sort of a crutch for the JFC/Swing developer transitioning to web development, and these days it's not like there's a lot of those.  But the code in the demo app seemed pretty reasonable.  I didn't pick up on the GWT connection until someone mentioned it in the Q&A so it wasn't a big distraction or anything.

The presenter Marcus Hellberg worked through this example in about half an hour giving a sense of how easy to use and powerful this framework is.  It was nice to see someone using Spring in one of these presentations and it is cool that Vaadin is available right there in the Spring Boot Initializr.  The demo app demonstrated some low-key dynamic effects like making DOM elements appear and disappear.

Bootstrap

So I've got this ancient relic of a web site.  I started this when I was at AT&T in 1995 and it shows.  Seriously, don't laugh at the content.  I used to try to keep it up to date but at some point other things just seemed more important.

Back about 3 years ago I read something about Bootstrap and thought, oh, that looks cool, I'll have to give that a try, then forgot all about it.  Until today.

A key feature of Bootstrap is that it's mobile-friendly, in fact, mobile-first so you should be able to resize the above page or even view it on your phone and it will stack the columns and otherwise make it look reasonable on the smaller screen.

So here is my foray into Bootstrap.  See especially the links page which uses the cool dynamic tabs feature.

Bootstrap allows you to work at a higher level, focusing more on your content and not so much on the ins and outs of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.  I'm actually looking for a way to start easing back into JavaScript but this framework really insulates you from it, at least at this simple-minded level I'm working at so far.