Team4Talent, the company I work for, was kind enough to allow me to go to ngEurope in Paris. ngEurope is Europe’s first Angular conference. In a few upcoming posts, I’ll share what I’ve learnt, along with some personal thoughts of mine. I’ll also (try to) answer some questions several people asked me. But if you can’t wait, the conclusion is that I love Angular and plan to use it. Where I work at the moment, we’ve decided HTML5 and javascript in general, and Angular specifically, are to be considered for future projects. For personal projects, I’ve already used it once, am developing with it now (using Cordova), and plan to use it in the future.
First, a quick thanks to my company for sending me, and the ngEurope team for organizing ngEurope. The concept was a little different from other conferences I’ve attended in the past. Most have 45-60 minute talks. ngEurope had 15-30 minute talks. Also refreshing (for me) was the fact that it was totally not Microsoft or .NET centric.
Less positive was the lack of wifi. After someone obtained the password and tweeted it, the wifi was of course flooded and thus very slow. A conference for (mainly) web developers without wifi… A bit of a shame actually. Also a lack of vegetarian food (fish doesn’t count), beamers in the back that only started working a few slides into the presentation,… A little rough around the edges, but I’m still happy I went.
That being said, let’s get to the most important stuff: the tech and the code!
I will dedicate separate posts to the parts I found most interesting, so here are some subjects that didn’t make it. This can be either because I didn’t find them interesting enough (a personal opinion) or because they warrant a bigger post (or multiple posts) all by themselves (and I don’t have the time right now).
New to AngularJS?
There’s lots of places to start. I started with the free Angular course at codeshool.com by Gregg Pollack. If you’re subscribed to Pluralsight or Egghead.io, they have good courses too. Also worth mentioning is Dan Wahlin’s AngularJS in 60ish minutes. Give (one of) them a go and you’ll see it’s not hard to get started, but it’s powerful when you’re an expert. Something I’m totally not, by the way.
Ionic
** **
Ionic is a very cool UI framework for building Angular apps on Cordova (the open source part of PhoneGap). It makes your app look and feel like native iOS or Android apps. No Windows Phone yet.
Cordova
Cordova is the open source part of PhoneGap. Provided you have npm installed, starting is as easy as doing:
npm install -g cordova
cordova create MyApp
This will scaffold a Cordova app, but it won’t do anything Angular for you. That’s a whole separate domain altogether. One which I’m only finding out about myself just now. But have a look at the ngCordova project for a set of Angular services that talk to Cordova. There are also Yeoman generators to get started.
i18n Internationalization
This is a good way of internationalizing your Angular app (though there is basic support for i18n already). It works with filters or directives. Filters are less performant but can update on the fly, while directives need a page refresh if the language is changed. There’s also support for gender and plurals.
Angular UI Bootstrap
This is a set of Angular directives based on Bootstrap CSS. You can find it here.
Those are some short items worth checking out. Next up: a quick overview of what’s new in Angular 1.3.
Also worth checking out
- ngImprovedTesting** **
- angularMockBack
In subsequent posts, I’ll dive a little deeper into sessions that I found interesting.