Application is being built using .Net 5 MVC & Web API. Application has a plugin system which is organized as below.
[Starting MVC Application]
|__MainLayOut
|__Modules
|__Plugin1
|_Binaries (Web APIs, MVC Controllers, logic, db access local to this plugin)
|_Views (has shared, _viewimports etc.. local to this module)
|_wwwroot (has static files local to this module)
|
|__Plugin2
|_Binaries (Web APIs, MVC Controllers, logic, db access local to this plugin)
|_Views (has shared, _viewimports etc.. local to this module)
|_wwwroot (has static files local to this module)
As you can see plugins are self contained (ex:- if you delete a plugin directory and restart the app) Any features related to that plugin will not work. (Also you can just zip the entire plugin directory and deploy it with some config file changes) Common features like User management/ Permissions etc. are provided to plugins via the main app.
As of now UI is rendered from server and WebAPIs are being called by the MVC Controllers and MVC controllers talk to Web APIs which I don't want to do when I am actually going to develop the final app.
My problem is I can move the UI part and do it as an Angular/React app. but then I can't use the plugin system that I have now. If I can do that, I should be able to break the angular/react components to different physical locations (plugin directories) and then be able to distribute those independently so that upon deployment client app will identify plugin related angular/react code and then load/run as necessary.
I couldn't find such example out there. They all have a separate Angular/React app. The other option I was thinking is to use RequireJs and AMD pattern where I can modularize my javascript code in different plugins. Main UI rendering will happen at server but client will take care of WebAPI calls getting data and binding. However this will not give me MVVM change detection which can be very useful.
So can I use Angular/React in such a way that I don't create a separate app, but use angular code in the existing app, create angualr/react modules in different plugin directories and get them to work together?
Related
Take a SaaS company that wants to pack all its services into a single, uhm.. Single Page Application using Angular (1). Now there is a public area (landing page, etc.) and an internal area. There are various layers of protection in the backend. There are different user groups with different privileges.
If the complete app is compiled into a single javascript file, hints for all routes can be found in the JS file quite easily. Then, there are services / $resources for interacting with the API, which again contain quite essential information on the functionality of the application.
Now the question: How could someone put modules on a certain non-binary protection level, and only load this particular module when the user is authorized to see it, all while not reloading the page?
I can find a way to lazily add modules to an angular application. I can also protect single files server sided and only send them to authorized users. But that seems like an unscalable hassle when there are more and more user groups.
Do you know any generic libraries for that purpose, ideally in sync with koa, which do not create a vast overhead? Do you know of some grunt / gulp / whatever processes, which help with that?
Thanks!
You can use latest ui.router which allows you to lazy load routes.
https://ui-router.github.io/ng1/docs/latest/interfaces/state.statedeclaration.html#lazyload
Also you can use web pack and use multiple entry points to create seperate bundles. https://webpack.github.io/docs/multiple-entry-points.html
By following above steps you can optimise the app but I don't think that this will add any protection to the web assets. You can minify to make life bit difficult to understand what your JS code is doing.
I have recently worked in a pure Scala-Play application and later in a pure AngularJS application. I'm very impressed with both and I'm wondering what is the sweet spot of combining the two frameworks together. Since the two frameworks can be complementary but also overlapping in different areas e.g. MVC and page routing, as far as I know these are some of the possibilities:
Single Page design, use AngularJS MVC-only and use Scala-Play as "dull" service layer backend with no full page refreshes.
Allow page reloads and each page reload becomes a different AngularJS root application. This seems quite flexible e.g. the client side is not bloatted with so much data for larger applications but better partitioned for the different use-cases. The downside is that I'd need different AngularJS MVC applications and I'm not even sure how to organize it as a project. Are there examples of this?
Typical server side Web App, use Play MVC-only and AngularJS for handling UI models for each separate page.
My choice of IDE for these types of architecture would of course be WebStorm but unfortunately I can't have all client-side (AngularJS and JavaScripts) and sever-side (Scala-Play) codes in a single project.
I believe that there is no the ultimate optimal architecture for combining Play and Angular. It depends on the specificity of the project, team etc.
The decision to develop UI part with Angular and the server side back-end with Play is very reasonable. Technically it may be done as following:
Development:
Both parts are developed as detached projects with the preferable IDE.
The client should have some entry point HTML page. It is reasonable to name it index.html, but is may be any other name.
For client-server integration do on the Play side as following:
Select a sub-folder under the play application root, which will serve as the "home" for the client files. The default solution is to use the folder public, since all files under it are automatically deployed.
All client files should be copied under the public folder. The files may be organized in any structure.
Add a route for the default URL as a route to the index.html. The argument path in the route should be the full path of the index.html relatively to the application root.
If index.html is directly in the public folder, the route is like this:
GET /defaultUrl controllers.Assets.at(path="/public", file ="index.html")
Add routing to the client files:
GET /*file controllers.Assets.at(path="/public", file)
Now the distribution package will include all the client files.
Putting of the client files into the public folder should be done automatically, for example by organizing the client directory structure and appropriate configuration of the client IDE.
You can find more examples in this post.
We have built a web application using asp.net MVC 5 with AngularJS. This means most (all except one) of the views are html files and controllers are .js files. All calls to the backend are ajax calls (web api).
Now, we have decided that our application should be 'extendable'. This poses no problem for the backend code since we can use MEF for that. But how should I approach this problem when I want to display different views when some plugin is intalled? How do I inject the .js controller files with new pieces of code? Is it even possible to do such a thing?
I have an AngularJS app (myApp) currently used only by my own ASP.NET MVC app. The AngularJS is working well in my app. Now other MVC apps also want this as an add-on (plugin). Is this possible to do without modifying my original AngularJS app, and been too intrusive to other apps?
I thought is like this:
distribute the myApp.js to an in-house CDN to be included the BundleConfig.cs by other apps
add a <DIV data-ng-app="myApp"> in pages of other apps so that my original AngularJS can be injected.
Far too many unknowns about how your app is configured for a precise answer but any module can be dependency injected into another module.
For simplicity sake assume that you have all the templates needed to run your app converted to javascript strings and use $templateCache() to register them and all the code for your app is in one file then anyone would be able to inject your module into theirs and use whatever components you have available.
All they would need would be a script tag that points at location for your app file ... and that location could be any server, cdn or local download directory
I have an existing webapp built on Laravel. I am moving to an Ionic build to create the native version.
How would you suggest I separate my views, and how do I call the routes? Has anyone any example.
Here is what I am about to do:
1. move all my views to the public folder
2. install Ionic in the public folder,
3. Using UI-route & Angular make $http calls to the backend.
Thanks for your input :-)
You can't simply do that.
If you have a "classic" Laravel app with blade templates, what you need to do is to expose an API from it.
Then you create an ionic app in a different directory (they are not related, so you don't have to mix them). You just need to develop your ionic app like any other ionic app. Then in your factories where you do the request to your API, you do something like:
$http.get('https://example.com/api/foo')
Where example.com is the domain of your Laravel application (You are going to need to activate CORS in it).
You just can't simply create an ionic app inside laravel, because that application will be built into an .apk to be installed on the phone and you can't add Laravel inside the package.
So the TL;DR is having your normal Laravel app where it lives, add it some public API so your ionic app can access it and then build an Ionic app from zero that will use that API.
It depends on you, but I prefer to keep the ionic project nested in /public, since I want a single-project app, the sources are clearly separated by being or not in the subfolder, but it helps your productivity, benefits are:
Single source control: Single source set for source version control (GIT, SVN, ...), so when I work I can do a single pull/checkout and push/checkin
Single app to deploy: Single domain, no cross-domain problems, single deploy via FTP is available, any standard php server can handle it with a single and standard account to handle
Coherent project without interdipendencies: I do not want to split logic dependencies of the same model between many projects, when I change something in backend or frontend that involve the other side, I want to have in the same project all the sources to update. It make not sense to have to go to a different project to adjust compatibility, it would be uselessy messy