Where to install Ionic with a Laravel backend? - angularjs

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

Related

Using angularjs/react in a plguin based asp.net core application where plugins can be deployed independantly

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?

Creating first angularjs SPA with VS2015

I am new to AngularJS and need some advice on how to structure a SPA with Web API for an external search application
Di I have to use
•MVC / razor views (leave all routing and rendering to Angular)? or just use 1 VS2015 app [use angularjs SPA template for VS2015 or just an empty web application with angular file and a webapi project under same solution?
any examples would be helpful to understand
For angular structure I am reading Google best practice and John Papa
Well, I think what you ran into now. I can suggest two of the ways you can choose.
If you want to keep your backend and frontend together you can go for angularjs SPA template for VS2015. It would come with the build pipelines, bundles and everything you'd need. Now you can choose to render your single page of angular to be rendered with a MVC razor view (if you want to have any mechanisms where you'd want to include your dependencies through the razor view) or just go with a blank html and web api controllers on the back. But you'd end up using one environment for all and I think that's best if you're building the full project.
Now, for the other way around, you can start with an web api project. You can instantiate your angular project with it or somewhere else. You can use yeoman or any scaffolding tool you like and use your own JS toolings you'd like to use. You can do the same in the VS project too but this approach is better if you want to keep the frontend and backend flavor separate.
And I'd suggest using typescript too.

Sails Angular Frontend

Ok so I have looked around and cannot find the exact answer I am looking for. When developing a Sails app (which I am new to) it appears that by default it creates its own frontend using EJS.
Is this correct?
If this is correct then why is there an npm for sails generate frontend
If I want to use an Angular frontend is sails-generate-frontend-angular the best route to go?
Thanks!
First you need to separate server templating (EJS) from angular.
Just because sails defaults to an EJS template engine does not mean that you can not still put angular is your asset library and create and angular app. EJS is (the default but not the only option) what sails uses as a programming language for building its templates on the server that then get delivered to the client. Angular templates are used once delivered to the client to display information and perform tasks specifically already in the client machine.
1.) See above
2.) Sails-generate-frontend helps to setup your asset pipeline. It creates grunt tasks to copy image files and setup your javascript libraries such as ANGULAR.js, jQuery ect for use in your front-end.
3.) It could be. It depends, what a lot of people do is setup 2 projects. They use Sails as their API and then setup a second project for their Angular app (especially if its a SPA).
If instead your just using angular is specific places in your app (think jQuery style), then you would use a something like generate-front-end to take the angular library from someplace (like bower_compenents) and place it in your assets when you lift your app. It also makes it avaiable so that it can be placed in your html to be included in your app.
I on the other hand, use sails templates (I use Jade instead of EJS) to create and modify my angular templates on the server before they reach the client. This is a slightly advanced practice and can get confusing if you don't understand the difference between generating html on the server vs client.
An alternate method of thinking about this would be creating your index page on the server. This page would include your css and scripts. It would possibly be the only page on your server and everything else would be angular templates rendered on the client asking for JSON calls. In this scenario you would be using SAILS (ejs, or jade or whatever) to render only a single page INDEX.js and that might be the only server template you have.
However, this being said. Sails ships with this stuff already. You don't need sails-generate-frontend. Its is already inside a standard sails app.

Fast way to develop AngularJS in a Java environment

I am currently working on a Java based Maven project that has a REST backend module and using angular JS as a frontend that uses the backend for data. The 2 modules are named "rest" and "web" accordingly and are deployed as 2 separate war files to a glassfish instance during development. The glassfish is on a different machine.
My problem is that this is kind of slow, especially when developing the angular based frontend. Fix a minor spelling mistake, package, redeploy. Not that slow but every character change or fiddling with angular is another 20-30 seconds lost.
One thing I tried is to directly load the files from the source directory into the browser with file:// tag. This is OK as long as it tries to call the REST backend which fails due to CORS (I don't remember the exact error message, it just doesn't work). This happens a lot so it's a no-go.
I'm open to every kind of solution to develop angular in a way that I could see my changes instantly instead of deploying it every time? Much like the guy does in the egghead videos.
I would recommend breaking your Angular JS application into its own separate project, this would be a new HTML5 project on Netbeans. That way you can focus on pure backend and frontend development in their respective projects and you do not have to manually separate the war files. This link will help you to get CORS working if you are defining your RESTFUL services with Jersey Access-Control-Allow-Origin in ajax call to jersey rest web services. Or you can just mock the data out in the front end project.

How are people using Yeoman?

I've been playing around with Yeoman and it's pretty great.
I'm wondering how people are integrating the resulting frontend app with backends?
Are you keeping them as separate code bases that potentially run on separate servers?
Are you stuffing the whole directory in a rails public folder and pointing the root route at index.html buried in there?
Up until now I've only ever used helpful gems to integrate backbone or ember into the rails asset pipeline. I could certainly move various files into the assets directory of a rails app but that kinda defeats the purpose of Yeoman.
So far I only used it to make and maintain the frontend app, using ajax to get all the information needed from the backend deployed as another project (web service).

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