Introduction to AngularJS

In this module, we’re going to examine a few features of JavaScript that we’ll need to know before we can make full use of the Angular framework.

AngularJS is a user interface framework. It makes it simple to build the front-end portion of a web application.

A module is a container. It holds instructions and code that lets AngularJS create all the pieces of your application, like controllers, services, providers, directives and filters.

Controllers handle user input events. They validate the input, and then call back-end services to do what the user wants.

Angular expressions are the little code snippets that look like JavaScript, that we usually put inside the little curly-brace bindings in the view.

Directives are the extensions to html that Angular reads and processes to build the view.

In this module, we look at a few of the more advanced view directives. ng-repeat lets us iterate over a collection in the view. We can use ng-switch to flip between multiple views. And, ng-include lets us display content from an external template file.

AngularJS apps do all the display handling in the browser, so we’re going to have to take some of the actions that we used to do on the server side, and move them over into JavaScript.

An Angular filter formats or transforms the value of an expression.

AngularJS services are JavaScript objects that contain reusable business logic. They form the ‘model’ layer in MVC. In general, services should focus on altering or providing data, not on display, or ‘view layer’ logic. That should be in formatters or templates.

The route service maps the web browser’s URL to external view template files. When the URL changes, the service loads in the associated view template.