Enter the dragon
Interning with Setfive for the last couple of months has given me the opportunity to both work with numerous, modern-day technologies and transition into being a more confident, organized developer. One technology in particular that I’ve had the chance to learn about and use extensively during my internship here is the JavaScript programming language. Programming with an MVC framework like AngularJs has shown me the many facets of the JavaScript language and given me an interesting foray into learning JavaScript from the top down.
Coming from a mainly C++ background the first thing I noticed about JavaScript was its flexibility. The mixture of the dynamic typing, along with the support of multiple programing paradigms (Functional programming and Imperative programming) gave me a freedom to program any way that I saw fit and do things that I never even thought were possible in a language with a stricter typing system. However this freedom definitely comes with a price, sometimes making even moderately complex programs both hard to navigate, and even harder to debug.
This lack of an inherent language structure, though initially causing a few headaches and even more than a few fist shaking bugs has, over time, helped ingrain both strong development skills as well an inherent need to intuitively structure code. Both of these skills are at the forefront of programming with AngualrJs.
Leveling up
My experience with Angularjs has definitely been an incredibly positive one, although the beginning was quite rough. Actually, the beginning was fairly easy however, the step after the “hello (insert name bound from text box)” step was actually the rough one. With Angular, easy things are very easy but can become difficult very quickly as soon as you are trying to develop something that is not so rudimentary.
My first experience with Angular came in the form of writing unit tests for a project that was under development here during the Summer. I spent a couple of weeks delving through a large Angular application written by one of our head engineers. After my introduction to the framework I was given the chance to use it for some development while working on some frontend modules for the Rotorobot site. These are the main challenges that I ran into while trying to learn Angular Js.
The Tough Stuff
The first challenge that I had to overcome was understanding the structure of the Angular framework. Being very inexperienced with the design pattern of Model View Controller (MVC) made this aspect the hardest part of learning Angular. Angular implements MVC by having the developer split their application into MVC components and then acts as a pipeline connecting them together. It is a robust MVC framework that promotes complicated integration of different components into whole applications. If you don’t have a sense of how the pieces fit together then the “Set it and forget it” or 2-way data-binding nature of the framework can easily turn into one of your biggest headaches.
The second challenge with learning Angular was understanding the way that scoping works within the context of the framework. What possibly could have possessed the developers of Angular to name one of the most confusing parts of their framework the same name as one of JavaScript’s most confusing aspects –who knows. In order to use some of the most powerful features of Angular such as, custom directives, it was really important to understand how scoping works or else it’s virtually impossible to link programs together. Developers would be left with a pile of stateless, independent components responsible for various tasks of the application rather than a connected working whole.
The last major challenge with learning Angular was thinking in terms of modularity. With things like custom directives, and the various service providers being at its core, the Angular framework really helps to promote code modularity. And breaking your application into small, reusable, testable components. This concept is huge in Angular, and I felt like seeing it work within the context of the framework has made me a better JavaScript programmer overall.
Overall I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Angularjs and felt like I learned a significant amount about structuring web-based applications. I am glad to have been given some experience with a modern JavaScript MVC framework and I wouldn’t hesitate to use Angular again in the future.