Modern Web Development

Let's jump straight in! We will start building an example application in Angular 5 to demonstrate MVVM, SASS and TypeScript. For this we need to prepare our development environment though, so let's do this first. Development Environment Tools Overview Let's start by saying we need to install NodeJS. NodeJS is a JavaScript runtime that was developed to run across all platforms and, perhaps most importantly, to run on the server-side. While we traditionally used JavaScript purely to execute in a client browser, it can now also be used to host web servers. There are many companies globally who make use of JavaScript as a server technology. One module that runs on Node as a server-side script and web-server is called "ExpressJS". Express is used by companies like IBM, Accenture and even Uber! When you install NodeJS, you will also notice that "NPM" is installed. NPM is the Package Manager for Node. (Node Package Manager) It will allow you to install pac...

In today's "modern" web, things are a bit different than they used to be a few years ago. Chances are that the majority of web sites that you visit today are using some kind of "modern web development" technology, it looks beautiful and behaves consistently across any device you browse it on. How can we achieve the same result for our own sites? What tools do others use and how deep is their knowledge in the various toolsets and frameworks? In this short series of blog posts I will attempt to guide you through the different tools and ideas that I use on a regular basis. While there are many toolkits, frameworks or methodologies out there, I will be primarily focusing on Angular 5 (for our web app), SASS (for stylesheets) and TypeScript. Coding like a Pro JavaScript JavaScript is still the only widely supported scripting language for web applications in browsers. Because of this, developers are still limited to delivering JS files to the client machine t...