My Angular journey

When I first joined UrboTour, my main responsibility was to design and develop the front end web application that will show the information of POIs to the visitor. It was more than obvious that we could not use static pages since the content was dynamic and could change over time. We should use a Javascript framework that contains an HTML dynamic templating engine to present our content.

At that time, I had some experience building web applications with BackboneJS and MarionetteJS but I was keen to learn something new. I spent a week reading articles on the web and watching discussions on StackOverflow about comparison of Javascript frameworks. The truth is that it was hard for me to decide because project deadlines were tight and a possible change mid-way would not be easy. Finally, we decided to start the implementation using MarionetteJS/BackboneJS so that we are on schedule, and in the meantime continue the research.

Not many days after our initial decision, there was a strange incident that changed our approach. I had a chat with one of my colleagues in my daily job about Javascript frameworks. He mentioned that one of our partners, which happens to be one of the largest software houses in Greece, was going to roll out a customized web application for its ERP platform in EmberJS, which I have not heard before. I thought that since their research team decided to invest on this framework for one of their products, it will worth to have a look. After about two weeks, one day that I returned back home I opened up my browser to start searching for it. Strangely, I could not remember the name of the framework. I tried to guess it by typing possible names on the search engine, but I was not sure. And there, among the results, I noticed AngularJS.

The front end services of the platform contain three separate web applications:

The first alpha version of the main application was shipped with AngularJS 1.0.7, one of the early official releases of the framework. The next couple of weeks after the deployment, we started to implement new features and we were so excited with the use of the framework that we decided to deploy it to the remaining web applications: Upanel and TravellerCompanion.

The first generally available version of the platform was shipped with AngularJS 1.3. During the development, it was used in conjunction with various technologies such as iBeacons, QR codes, Google Maps and weather APIs and cooperated seamlessly.

Right now, we are in the process of migrating the main application to AngularJS 1.6 so that we can convert it later to Angular. We decided to leave the remaining applications intact for the time being, because the main application is used extensively in relation to the other two.

During my involvement in the development of UrboTour framework, I loved AngularJS so much that I decided to invest on it and become an expert. I now use it in my everyday coding life. I also like to help others with it so I became an active member of various open source projects with Angular and AngularJS on GitHub.

Do you have any AngularJS/Angular related story to share? Please, let me know on the comments below!

Related posts:

I was recently asked to write an article on the ethics of gamification for the ACM’s student publication XRDS. Here it is! It should download a PDF. I would love to hear your thoughts :) If the…

Dass die Vorstellung vom Tod eine Faszination in sich birgt ist unbestritten. Fast alle großen Philosophen haben sich darüber, mehr oder weniger, Gedanken gemacht. Im folgenden möchte ich ihnen…

There is a question as to what the value of curiosity is if there is any. Yes, curiosity helps us search for more information about what interests us and that we do not yet know about. It drives us…