Paleolithic JavaScript - SproutCore

In the beginning, there was SproutCore. It was the first comprehensive JavaScript framework aimed at making it easy to build desktop-quality single-page web apps. It’s not that this wasn’t possible before. When Google released Gmail, it showed the world that web apps really could replace complex desktop applications. Google even open-sourced the Closure toolkit—a set of libraries and an optimizing compiler that it used to build Gmail.

The problem was that Google’s Closure tools weren’t very developer-friendly. They relied heavily on Java, which alienated web developers who were used to working with JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, and Python. Gmail was a great demonstration of what was possible, but developing similar applications still felt out of reach for many.

Some courageous developers managed to string together amazing single page apps using a combination of jQuery, duct tape, and hope. While these apps looked amazing to end-users, for the developers working on them, the apps quickly turned into hulking piles of technical debt that made the dev team dread heading to work in the morning.

As a result, a few enterprising developers began to work on frameworks that would bring Gmail-like apps within easy reach of web developers everywhere. SproutCore was the first of these frameworks to take off. It came with a complete set of widgets that made it possible to build complex web applications without even touching HTML or CSS.

This ended up being great for former desktop developers who had been dragged kicking and screaming onto the web. Several more frameworks popped up with similar goals; GWTand Cappuccino were the most prominent. These frameworks even avoided JavaScript by transpiling other languages into JS. Again, this was great for desktop developers. But it left passionate web developers out in the cold and made them feel as though their hard-won HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills weren’t valuable.

This left an opening for a framework that truly embraced the web, instead of trying to plaster over it and pretend it was something else. A couple of early frameworks (Backbone and Knockout) appeared, and achieved a moderate amount of success. Ember also showed up around this time. It took SproutCore, stripped it down to its bones, and tried to rebuild it into something truly web-friendly. Ember wanted to be the Six Million Dollar Man of the JavaScript world: rebuilt better, stronger, and faster.

None of these frameworks rocketed to popularity. The world was waiting for something better. In 2010, that something better appeared—it was named Angular.

The Golden Age of Angular

Even before Angular version 1.0 had been released, Angular took the front-end development world by storm. Finally, we had an easy-to-use JavaScript framework that treated HTML as a first-class citizen. Developers and designers could now work together to build amazing single-page applications. This came as a relief to designers, who had been annoyed and offended because older frameworks had treated HTML and CSS as tools for barbarians, tools that no civilized developer should have to touch.

The first thing that seemed magical to developers trying Angular for the first time was two-way data binding. Prior to this, most developers had only seen this kind of data binding in desktop frameworks like WPF and Windows Forms. It was great to be able to bind forms and other UI elements to JavaScript model objects. While two-way data binding could cause performance problems when overused, teams that used it judiciously found that Angular enabled them to create complex front-end applications much more quickly than ever before.

Angular proved to be popular for more than just easy binding of data to HTML elements. Angular directives provided an easy way to create reusable HTML + CSS components. Although other JavaScript frameworks provided this before Angular, Angular was the first one that became extremely popular. Reusable components had long been in-use in server-side frameworks. ASP.NET user controls and partial templates in Rails and Django are but a few examples.

Finally, Angular made dependency injection popular in the front-end development world. Dependency injection had long been popular in enterprise applications, which is perhaps why it hadn’t caught on in the JavaScript world. Front-end developers have long been averse to what they see as needlessly complex enterprise software design patterns. This concern isn’t without merit. Have you ever, in the course of writing an application, said to yourself “What I really need here is a “SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstanceFactory?”

Dependency injection, though, has proven its worth. And Angular made dependency injection easy to use for an audience that hadn’t used it much in the past. Need an HTTP client? Or perhaps you’d like to do some animation? No problem. Angular had built-in services for those. Just ask for them, and Angular would inject them into your components. No need to instantiate anything yourself.

Or perhaps you wanted to use the browser’s window or location objects without making it impossible to unit test your components outside of a browser? Angular had you covered there too, with its built-in $window and $location services. At runtime, you’d get the browser objects you were expecting. And when running unit tests server-side in Node.js, you could pass mock services into your components to ensure they behaved as expected in various scenarios.

If all of this wasn’t enough, Angular also made it simple to register and inject your own services. For developers who were used to binding all their data to the DOM and hoping for the best, this was awesome. If you were writing a new front-end app that called for APIs that would cost your company a lot of money if overused, you’d probably prefer to be able to write tests ahead of time to ensure that your application doesn’t try to do something like calling the Twilio API 800 million times.

So you’d create a Twilio service that gets injected at runtime. At testing time, you’d create a mock service that records the cost of every API call your application is trying to make. You’d write tests that cover common usage scenarios and ensure that these scenarios don’t result in your company receiving a 7-figure bill. Overall, most developers found that Angular directives combined with dependency injection made it possible to write modular, testable front-end applications using tried-and-true software engineering techniques. Many development teams decided that this resulted in a happy state of affairs, and decided to go all-in on Angular.

#ultimate #web #mobile #industry news #angular