Hello coders! Hope you are doing well with app development. The productivity of each web application depends on its structure, or as it called – project architecture. This is where every developer should start their project and undoubtedly be aware of this issue. So in this article you will read about the base of web architecture, how it interacts in AngularJS and why it is so important to adhere to this concept. Let’s start from the beginning.
AngularJS is a structured framework for creating dynamic web applications. With this HTML framework, you can use HTML as your own templating language and extend its syntax so that writing applications becomes as straightforward and compact as could reasonably be expected. The standard set of tools allows you to avoid writing a big code in your application using data binding and dependency injection. Furthermore, everything occurs on the browser side in JavaScript, making AngularJS the ideal accomplice for any server-side technology. Angular is not just one piece of the puzzle in building a client-side web application. It manages all the code that is written for DOM elements and AJAX-calls, and contains that code in a well-organized structure. This makes Angular extremely confident in how applications should be built that perform operations such as create, read, update, and delete data (CRUD). But despite this confidence, it is so flexible that the template for building applications can be changed at the request of the developer.
What are we talking about when we refer to the application architecture?
We are referring to the way in which the four basic functions of applications are distributed between clients and servers and what are these functions. The first one is going to be data storage and data access. Basically at some point of the application we need to be able to store the data that the client and the user is working with. And we need to store it somewhere in an orderly fashion. This is the functions of data storage and their access. Then we need to manipulate this data and this is going to be done by what we call the application logic. This is where we manipulate the data that is stored somewhere. Any software that we use to manipulate the data we would consider as a part of the application logic. And finally we have the presentation logic which is also known as a graphical user interface. It is what the end user uses to interact with the software, it’s a part where we have a screen and a keyboard, a mouse that we use to interact with the application itself.
What about AngularJS web application architecture?
As you already know, AngularJS uses the MVC architecture in its approach for creating web applications. MVC architecture is just a programming methodology which aims to split your application into three core components and they are models, views and controllers. These three components are properly combined to form your app.
The Model. You can just think of it as data and that can be JSON data or data from a database. In AngularJS whatever the data we use it is called the model. For example if we have ever seen the list of users stored in a user’s object in JavaScript, the model would be the users or the model could be something as small as a numeric value which stores the age of person or something like that. Either way the model is just the data that we work with in AngularJS.
To show the data to users in a web browser we use views and that is just the ‘V’ in MVC architecture. So, the view is a kind of HTML template which represents a certain view or state in your application. For example we might have a view which displays a list of active users on your website. Now we can insert a model data into our views by using what’s called expressions in AngularJS and we are talking about things that look something like an HTML tag. And that’s going to dynamically show the data to the user.
Finally, the ‘C’ stands for controllers. This is where we literally control the functionality of our views. It’s the JavaScript that controls the interaction between our models (which is the data) and views. It’s kind of a bridge which lets data pass between them. Controllers can react to actions on a page such as clicking a button and then decide what to do in response to that click. For example, going out to a model, grabbing data and then putting it back into view. They’ll add the glue that holds everything together in your application. We can also have different controllers for different areas in our application. For example, a registration controller for registering users or a contact controller to process contact form data.
Here is a quick example of using the MVC approach:
– user clicks a ‘show user’ button in a view on your website;
– the ‘user controller’ then recognizes the button click event and performs a function;
– the function communicates with the ‘users’ model and retrieves all the user data;
– the controller passes accessibility to this data to the view, which then displays it to the end user via expressions.
How to make the application significantly productive?
When writing an Angular application we need to make sure we break down our code into smaller pieces for a specific functionality. For example you will have services which are going to be used in different modules, reusable components, pipes to format your data. There are some common modules that every application requires. For instance, every application needs an authentication (login, registration, reset-password, forgot-password, main confirmation pages), a core module (services, guards, reusable components, common modules and pages), a main dashboard area (application pages, navigation, user interface, template). If it is a mobile application then you might have a navigation dashboard hype area. We have some common services in Angular application, such as HTPP service which is responsible for making all the CRUD operations in your application. The best thing about running an HTPP service is that you make sure that any AP call that you make goes through this server. So if there is a problem with this consider that you know the way to go and look for the problem. Also we need to have the error handling service, utility services and storage service.
Why should we worry about code structure?
There are few key points to it:
– it’s easier to debug;
– it’s clean code;
– performance;
– scalability.
Conclusion
Now you know why the architecture of the web application is very important for its proper functioning. Therefore, first of all, the developer must know the structure of the framework, which he uses and do not forget about the structure of the code he writes. Above I described the basic knowledge of this concept and the advantages of structuring your project. I hope this information was useful. Good luck!