AngularJS

 
This is an introduction to AngularJS and is mainly meant as a internal reference for our development team. More posts on the topic will follow.

Why AngularJS?

AngularJS is one of the most popular Open Source JavaScript frameworks. It is developed by Google and has a huge community surrounding and supporting it. We use AngularJS to migrate the MS Silverlight based client of our complex enterprise application to HTML5/CSS/JavaScript.
Several factors were deciding in the choice of the framework. Alternatives that we have considered were

• no framework, just use various libraries and build our own infrastructure
• Ember
• Durandel
• AngularJS

We have been developing a lot of infrastructure on our own in the past. In the beginning this was a (sometimes huge) advantage but became more and more a burden over time. Thus we decided not to go this route this time and as a consequence to exclude variant one.
Base on our experience with Silverlight we also wanted to avoid a proprietary or closed source solution.
AngularJS seems to have the biggest and most active community. For pretty much any question in and around AngularJS one can find answers on StackOverflow. This is a very important point for a team where not every member is an expert. Quick accessibility of help and insight is a big plus. It is easy to find new developers that have a working knowledge of AngularJS.
AngularJS is extremely simple to start with. Let’s just do it

Let’s start with AngularJS

To start coding with angular we need nothing else then download the angular.js file (stable branch, uncompressed) from here and use a text editor like Notepad++, Vim or Sublime to name just a few.

1. Create a new folder HelloAngular.
2. Download the angular.js file.
3. Copy the downloaded JavaScript file angular.js into the above folder.
4. Using your favorite text editor create a new file step1.html in the same folder.
5. Add the necessary html tags for a standard HTML5 web page
   
6. Add angular.js to the page by adding a