Piggybacking on the previous Rails app, the fourth assessment requires students to implement jQuery on the front-end while communicating with the server using AJAX. Initially, I thought this would be an easy assignment since it adds to an existing application rather than creating one from scratch. It did come with its own difficulties, however, which will be discussed later in this post.
The third assessment requires building a Ruby on Rails application that manages data through complex forms and RESTful routes. Trying to avoid some of the “cliche” domains seen repeatedly throughout the curriculum, I decided to base my domain on a simple restaurant application. Users can submit ratings and reviews for some of their favorite (or not-so favorite) restaurants, and they can also search for other people’s reviews on a particular restaurant.
On the client side, AngularJS provides built-in methods for form validation. Previously, users were notified about validation errors after form submission. AngularJS, on the other hand, provides instant feedback for users before the form is even sent across the Internet.
Filters are functions that can be implemented in AngularJS to manipulate, or filter data. One aspect that I found to be particularly useful is the way in which filters can be used to easily display data to users of a web application.
TodoMVC is an open source project that provides various implementations of a to-do app in several frameworks. Using a vanilla JavaScript example as a template, the objective is to re-build a modified version of the application using Rails and JavaScript.