thisissoon.com frontend

This project structure is based on the angular-seed application skeleton for a typical AngularJS web app.

The project is preconfigured to install the Angular framework and a bunch of development and testing tools for instant web development gratification.

Getting Started

To get you started you can simply clone the repository and install the dependencies:

Clone thisissoon.com frontend repository

Clone the thisissoon-frontend repository using git:

cd path/to/parent/directory
git clone git@github.com:thisissoon/thisissoon-frontend.git
cd thisissoon-frontend

Install Dependencies

We have two kinds of dependencies in this project: tools and angular framework code. The tools help us manage and test the application.

• We get the tools we depend upon via npm, the node package manager.
• We get the angular code via bower, a client-side code package manager.
• We run regular tasks like code minification via grunt, a javascript task runner.

The following tools require super user privileges so you will need to install them separately like so:

sudo npm install -g bower 
sudo npm install -g grunt-cli

We have preconfigured npm to automatically run bower so we can simply do:

npm install

Behind the scenes this will also call bower install. You should find that you have two new folders in your project.

• node_modules - contains the npm packages for the tools we need
• app/components - contains the angular framework files and other libraries

Install Libraries

We install our frontend libraries via bower, a client-side code package manager.

All frontend depenancies such as angular will be installed when running npm install. To manully install all depenancies run:

bower install

To install a new library such as bootstrap we can simply do:

bower install bootstrap --save

And this will download the bootstrap package from bower and also update the bower.json file to include that package. You will then need to add the script tag to app/index.html like so:

<script src="path/to/bootstrap.js"></script>

Run the Application

We have preconfigured the project with a simple development web server. The simplest way to start this server is:

grunt server

Now browse to the app at http://localhost:8000/app/.

If you are doing any javascript development you can instead run:

grunt serverjs

To run tests as well everytime a javascript file is updated

To watch all files run:

grunt serverall

To run tests or compile less to css when the relevent files are updated.

Running the build script

To create a build to deploy for a production environment simply run:

grunt build

The build files will then be in the dist/ directory.

Directory Layout

app/                    --> all of the files to be used in production
  components/           --> all of our javascript libraries (installed using bower)
  css/                  --> css files
    app.css             --> default stylesheet (generated using less)
  img/                  --> image files
  less/                 --> less folder
    default/            --> styling appied to all screen sizes (e.g. fonts, colors etc..)
      core/             --> core styling applied to all screen sizes 
      modules/          --> module styling applied to all screen sizes
    large/              --> styling appied to large screen screen sizes (overrides styling in default folder)
      core/             --> core styling applied to large screen screen sizes
      modules/          --> module styling applied to large screen screen sizes 
    tablet/             --> styling appied to tablet screen sizes (overrides styling in default folder)
      core/             --> core styling applied to tablet screens 
      modules/          --> module styling applied to tablet screens
    mobile/             --> styling appied to mobile screen sizes (overrides styling in default folder)
      core/             --> core styling applied to mobile screens 
      modules/          --> module styling applied to mobile screens  
  index.html            --> app layout file (the main html template file of the app)
  js/                   --> javascript files
    {app}/              --> angular module javascript files
      {app}.js          --> angular module initialisation
      config.js         --> angular module config
      controllers/      --> controllers
        {view}Ctrl.js   
      directives/       --> directives
        {module}.js     
    partials/           --> angular view partials (partial html templates)
      partial1.html
      partial2.html
modules/                --> static html files for building and testing styling and mark up
  {module}/
    index.html
tests/                  --> test config and source files
  e2e/                  --> end-to-end specs
    specs/              
      scenarios.js
    protractor.conf.js  --> config file for running e2e tests with Protractor
  unit/                 --> unit level specs/tests
    {app}/              --> follows the same folder structure as javascript files in app folder
      controllers/      --> controller folder
        {view}Ctrl.js   --> view controller tests
      directives/
        {module}.js     --> module directive test

Testing

There are two kinds of tests in the angular-seed application: Unit tests and End to End tests.

Running Unit Tests

The angular-seed app comes preconfigured with unit tests. These are written in Jasmine, which we run with Grunt.

• the configuration is found in Gruntfile.js
• the unit tests are found in tests/unit/.

The easiest way to run the unit tests is to do:

grunt test

This script will start the Jasmine test runner to execute the unit tests. You can also run:

grunt serverjs

Where the grunt watch command will sit and watch the source and test files for changes and then re-run the tests whenever any of them change. This is the recommended strategy; if you unit tests are being run every time you save a file then you receive instant feedback on any changes that break the expected code functionality.

End to end testing

The angular-seed app comes with end-to-end tests, again written in Jasmine. These tests are run with the Protractor End-to-End test runner. It uses native events and has special features for Angular applications.

• the configuration is found at tests/e2e/protractor.conf.js
• the end-to-end tests are found in tests/e2e/specs/

Protractor simulates interaction with our web app and verifies that the application responds correctly. Therefore, our web server needs to be serving up the application, so that Protractor can interact with it. To run end to end tests we first need to install protractor with global permissions. You may need to run this command with superuser privileges:

npm install -g protractor

Once you have ensured that the development web server hosting our application is up and running and WebDriver is updated, you can run the end-to-end tests using the supplied grunt task:

grunt e2e

Behind the scenes this will also run webdriver-manager update && webdriver-manager start. This will download and install the latest version of the stand-alone WebDriver tool and start the Selenium web server. This script will execute the end-to-end tests against the application being hosted on the development server.

Contact

For more information on AngularJS please check out http://angularjs.org/