I’ve been meaning to write a small tutorial for building web applications. Now it’s time! Let’s define the steps and choose some solutions for developing back-end java web application.
I will give my design recommendations and list a technologies I would use. You may have your own opinion and you may share it in comment. Over time, this post may change since my favourites are also changing over time.
There are situations when you need to analyze user’s experience but can’t use a third-party web analytics solutions like Google Analytics or Yandex Metrika. For example, if your production environment is PCI DSS compliant. In this case you have to deploy self-hosted analytics engine and inside your environment and configure user actions tracking in your application.
One of the possible solutions is the piwik as analytics engine + Angulartics or angular-piwik for tracking events inside AngularJS application.
In addition to web analytics features, piwik offers a log analytics.
Another option is to use Open Web Analytics (OWA) and write a plugin for Angulartics. OWA Demo
Modern web application should be user friendly and notify the User when time consuming operation is on the way, e.g. uploading file or downloading data. There are a some solutions for AngularJS which are fairy easy to integrate.
First one is Angular Loading Bar. It can be attached to your application with almost zero configuration and does not affect application design.
It attaches the interceptor to $http service and displays a thin progressbar on the top edge of the page.
Demo
Another component is angular-busy. It is more customizable and can show a spinner with backdrop above any page element. Just wrap it with <div cg-busy="..."/>.
But it may require some customization.
Demo
Also, there are some examples how to add loading indicator to ui-router.
Stay DRY! Don’t waste your time implementing tags input control for AngularJS yourself! There is an excellent AngularJS module for that called “ngTagsInput”. It’s also supports autocomptetion, validations,custom styles and templates. See the demos.
It took me just 10 minutes to add that type of control to my application.
All you need to do is:
npm install ng-tags-input --save
bower install ng-tags-input --save
Include script and CSS to your html page. If you’re using some dependency injection pre-processor like gulp-inject or gulp-ng-inject you don’t need it.
<script src="angular.js"></script>
<script src="ng-tags-input.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ng-tags-input.css">
declare module dependency:
angular.module('myApp', ['ngTagsInput'])
.controller('MyCtrl', function($scope, $http) {
$scope.tags = [
{ text: 'just' },
{ text: 'some' },
{ text: 'cool' },
{ text: 'tags' }
];
$scope.loadTags = function(query) {
return $http.get('/tags?query=' + query);
};
});
Add input control to html
<body ng-app="myApp" ng-controller="MyCtrl">
<tags-input ng-model="tags">
<auto-complete source="loadTags($query)"></auto-complete>
</tags-input>
</body>
Pretty simple, isn’t it?
The only thing to consider is handling of the tags model. $scope.tags will be an array of objects on the form {text:value}. You may need to transfer them to array of strings:
var tagValues = $scope.tags.map(function(input) {return input.text;});
User authentication is an important part of the web service API design. One of the common approach is the Hash-based Message Authentication Code – HMAC. Used together with transport level security it provides reliable mechanizm of user authentication and message integrity validation.
After playing with ui.grid I found one more library to impmenent grids in AngularJS - angularGrid.
It’s quite easy to integrate and faster than ui.grid. You may find other reasons of using this grid on the author’s post.
Here are some useful links to security resources:
Spring Boot is an excellent tool to bootstrap java application. Most of the references mention how to create a standalone java application, optionally with embedded web server (tomcat or jetty). But Spring Boot supports also creating web applications intended to run within servlet container.
If you are involved in software development then recalling a basic testing principles once again is not a waste of time. So here are the principles:
I recommend reading a book “The Art of Software Testing” by Glenford j. Myers, Tom Badgett and Corey Sandler (ISBN: 978-1-118-03196-4).
You most likely used Base64 encoding. It’s about encoding any sequence of data as a printable string (digits, lower case and upper case letters). But Base64 has variations. E.g., not every Base64 variant allows safe transfer of any data as URL parameters. For that purpose there is a special dialect of Base64: Url-safe encoding.