 Resources from Lukas Ruebbelke in 2024

One of the hardest things about writing non-trivial applications is managing state. In our attempt to effectively manage state, we introduce additional complexity by trying to control application flow and the amount of code volume that comes from all of this. Redux gives us the ability to address state management and communication in astonishingly simple semantics that can be explained in just a couple minutes. The beauty of Redux is that it is not only a library but a pattern that works very will within Angular 1.x applications. In this series, we are going to learn how to integrate redux (the pattern) into Eggly from scratch and then introduce **ng-redux** and add in **Redux DevTools** at the end for fun.

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

Build Angular 1.x Apps with Redux

Front-end web architecture has made exciting advances in recent years. But before we get to that we need to have a discussion on what has led us to this point and the driving principles behind it.

Since JQuery, we've progressively been decoupling our logic from the DOM. After JQuery, frameworks like Angular were able to abstract that logic into controllers and services. Then Redux came along and brought a simplified that let us reorganize our logic into more cohesive units. 

We should be taking advantage of improved decoupling in the modern web. If you can write a function you can write an endpoint. And if you understand frontend architecture principles, then you already understand cloud architecture principles. 

In this course, you will learn how to decouple JavaScript functions from the environment they live in. By using the Serverless framework and AWS, you will see how straightforward it is to create an endpoint. 

So check out this course and start lifting your functions into the cloud today!

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

javascript

Transform Local Functions Into Endpoints With Serverless

Implementing modern component-based architecture in your new or existing Angular 1.x web application is a breath of fresh air.

In this course, you are going to take a close look at Eggly, an Angular 1.x application for organizing bookmarks, and build it using modern patterns and practices, inspired by Angular 2's recommended architecture.

You will learn how to leverage ES6 in your Angular 1 applications through Babel, and fully understand the core patterns that are used in a composed modular web application. 

This course will teach you how to leverage your existing knowledge of Angular, while preparing your mind (and applications!) for the future.

If you are interested, there is a [companion guide](http://www.angular2patterns.com/) that digs deeper into the patterns found in this course and Angular 2.

Using Angular 2 Patterns in Angular 1.x Apps

In Angular, we want to keep our controllers lightweight and specific to the view that it is controlling. To accomplish this, we are going to refactor our categories collection into a CategoriesModel. A recurring theme in Angular 2 is that everything is "just a class". When we create our controllers and services in an Angular 2 style, they are also "just a class". We will see this in action as we convert our controller almost verbatim into a service.

Refactor Angular Controller Logic to Services

The first step to **any** AngularJS project, is actually adding AngularJS to the page. This lesson will show you adding the Angular script, initializing the app with ng-app, and simple two way binding with ng-model. This is a *beginner* level lesson.

First Step: Adding Angular to the HTML Page

Up to this point, we have created an effective, yet rudimentary, implementation of Redux by manually creating an application store, reducers and action creators. We have already made significant progress in simplifying state management within our application, but we have in fact only touched the surface of what Redux has to offer.

In this lesson, we are going to introduce ngRedux into our application and let it handle the rest of the heavy lifting as we work through this series. ngRedux is a project that provides angular bindings to redux to streamline integrating it into our application.

Angular 1.x Redux: Integrate ngRedux

In this introductory lesson, we will discuss how the architectural concepts of Angular 2 can be applied to AngularJS 1.x. We will also take a brief tour of the concepts that we will be covering in this series as well as how the code is structured per lesson.

Introducing Angular 2 Concepts in Angular 1

TimelineLite is a piece of the Greensock TweenMax library that provides the ability to create sequenced animation with very little code or setup.

Greensock TimelineLite Animation Sequences

Traditionally you had to create DOM elements to test a directive but by shifting our focus to components, writing unit tests got a lot easier using **$componentController** within **ngMocks**. We can now test our component's controller with an easy to use API that does not require us to spin up any DOM elements to do so. In this lesson, we will see how our ES6 tests are transpiled, learn how to test a component using **$componentController** and talk about how to simulate lifecycle hooks.

Test an Angular Component with $componentController

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to integrate Redux Devtools into our Angular application.

Redux Devtools is a live-editing time travel environment for Redux. Devtools boasts a list of awesome features but my two favorite ones are that we can inspect every state and action as it happens and we can go back in time by “cancelling” actions.

This is going to be an interesting lesson because, in order for this to work, we are going to need to make something that was written for React work in Angular. For the most part, everything will play side by side with one small trick that we will pull off at the end to force an Angular digest cycle when React manipulates the application store. 

Angular 1.x Redux: Integrate Redux Devtools

One of the biggest mental shifts that developers have to take when embracing redux is shifting from mutable operations to immutable operations. The problem with mutable operations is that they create side effects that involve anything else that is referencing the thing that is being mutated.

With immutable operations within a reducer, a new object is returned for every operation – completely bypassing the possibility that an existing reference is going to be compromised. It is then up to the consumer to decide how they want to get the new data and what to do with it.

In this lesson, we are going to flesh out the CRUD functionality of our bookmarks reducer, doing it first using mutable operations and then refactoring it to use immutable operations.

Angular 1.x Redux: Avoid State Mutation with Immutable Operations

Manually creating action items every time we need to dispatch an action eventually accumulates to a very tedious process. In this lesson, we will learn how to abstract out the creation of action items so that we consolidate their creation into a single place. This not only creates efficiencies in how we express code but also reduces code volume while simultaneously increasing stability. 

Angular 1.x Redux: Create Reusable Actions with Action Creators

In Angular, our controllers should be small and focused on the view that it is controlling. We accomplish this by moving as much logic and state as we can into models. Angular 2 introduced observables and async pipes which make it easy to manage state and communicate that directly to our templates.

We can start to point our Angular 1 applications in that direction by binding to our models directly from within our controllers. In this lesson, we will see a simple example of this technique and a slightly more advanced case where we lose the lexical reference to the `this` keyword. 

Build Lightweight Controllers by Binding to Models in Angular

In this lesson, we are going to talk about dependency injection in an Angular application in ES6. There is a gotcha that I want to point out that most people will run into especially if they have not spent a lot of time using a classical language. We will start with a contrived example and then anchor it back into our application when we modify our **CategoriesModel** to use the **$q** service to return a promise.

Use Dependency Injection with ES6 and Angular

In this lesson, we are are going to learn how to abstract out state mutations into a reducer. In our current Eggly application, all of the state and business logic for our categories is handled within the categories model. We are going to refactor our code to entirely eliminate the need for our categories model by building out a couple of reducers and seeing how we can interact with them directly. 
The key thing to notice as we build out our reducers is that a reducer itself is completely stateless because it receives current state every single time it needs to calculate and return the new state. With a clearly defined contract of inputs and outputs, this makes testing reducers really easy which is one of the huge benefits of using this approach. 

Angular 1.x Redux: Handle State Mutations with Reducers

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to enable our store to work with more than one reducer in an application.

Currently, we have set up our store to work with the categories reducer exclusively, but this leaves us with a real problem, what if we want to keep track of the currently selected category within our store so that we can access that data somewhere else in the app? It is safe to say that most applications consist of many data models interacting together, and we need a way to accommodate this within the single state tree in our application.

When we initialize our app store, wouldn't it be convenient if we could take all of our reducers and combine them into one big reducer that our store knows how to work with? Well, this is exactly what the combine reducer method does in Redux. It allows us to combine reducers together and then access them as a named property on our application store.

We currently have a category reducer just hanging out here doing nothing because we have been focusing entirely on the categories reducer. We are going to combine the two reducers so that we can use the current category data within our bookmarks component.

Angular 1.x Redux: Handle Multiple Models by Combining Reducers

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to build an application store so that we can have a single place to store our application state. Reducers are great for updating state because they are stateless, but they are very bad at preserving state, which is vital when you need to reference state in more than one place.

We will build out a simple application store that will be responsible for keeping track of our categories collection that our categories controller can consume.

Angular 1.x Redux: Persist State with an Application Store

In this lesson, we are going are going to apply everything that we have learned by building out our bookmarks component to be powered by Redux. This will help reinforce all the techniques we have covered by seeing them built out  in a single, contiguous lesson.

We will walk through the steps necessary to phase out the bookmarks model with a Redux implementation that includes building and integrating the equivalent reducers and action creators to integrate into our application.

Angular 1.x Redux: Put It All Together

The simplest version of a component in Angular 2 is nothing more than a container for a template. When we need to introduce imperative logic into our component, we do that via an ES6 class. We accomplish the exact same thing in Angular 1.x by using an ES6 class to serve as a controller for a component. In this lesson, we will examine an Angular 2 component to establish the pattern and then illustrate the similarity as we build out our own controller in ES6.

Build an Angular Component Controller Using ES6 Class

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to map our Angular component directly to our application store using the connect method on ngRedux. 

In Angular, it is a common technique to bind a controller property directly to the model so that our controllers remain lightweight and operate more as a pass through mechanism than anything else.

Using the connect method, we can accomplish the same effect by not only binding properties directly to the application store, but also binding our controller to our action creators. This allows us to drastically simplify our controllers as we are able to delete a bunch of local controller methods as they become unnecessary because of our mappings.

Angular 1.x Redux: Map State and Dispatchers to Redux

Angular exposes key events within a component's lifecycle so that we can apply our own custom logic. In this lesson, we will learn how to leverage component lifecycle hooks to adhere to best practices of keeping our initialization logic out of our constructor.

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Lukas Ruebbelke