Category Archives: Web Development

Azure Functions and Serverless Computing

The post “Azure Functions and Serverless Computing” appeared first on MSDN Azure Development Community.

In my previous blog post, WebJobs in Azure with .NET Core 2.1, I briefly mentioned Azure Functions. Azure Functions are usually small (or somewhat larger) bits of code that run in Azure and are triggered by some event. Azure takes complete care of the entire infrastructure of your Functions making it a so-called serverless solution. The only thing you need to worry about is your code.

The code samples for this post can be found on my GitHub profile. You shouldn’t really need it because I’m only using default templates, but I’ve included them because I needed them in source control for CI/CD anyway.

Serverless computing

Before we get into Azure Functions I’d like to explain a bit about serverless computing. Serverless computing isn’t completely serverless, your code still needs somewhere to run after all. However, the servers are completely managed by your cloud provider, which is Azure in our case.

With most App Services, like a Web App or an API App, you need an App Service Plan, which is basically a server that has x CPU cores and y memory. While you can run your Functions on an App Service Plan it’s far more interesting to run them in a so-called “Consumption Plan”. With a consumption plan, your resources are completely dynamic, meaning you’re only actually using a server when your code is running.

It’s cheap

Let me repeat that, you’re only actually using a server when your code is running. This may seem trivial, but has some huge implications! With an App Service Plan, you always have a server even when no code is running. This means you pay a monthly fee just to keep the server up and running. See where this is heading? That’s right, with a consumption plan you pay only when your code is running because that’s the only time you’re actually using resources!

There’s a pretty complicated formula using running time, memory usage and executions, but believe me, Functions are cheap. Your first million executions and 400,000 GB/sec (whatever that means) are free. Microsoft has a pricing example which just verifies that it’s cheap.

It’s dynamic

Price is cool, but we ain’t cheap! Probably the coolest feature about Functions is that Azure scales servers up and down depending on how busy your function is. So let’s say you’re doing some heavy computing which takes a while to run and is pretty resource intensive, but you need to do that 100 times in parallel… Azure just spins up some extra servers dynamically (and, of course, you pay x times more, but that’s still pretty cheap). When your calculations are complete your servers are released and you stop paying. There is a limit to this behavior. Azure will spin up a maximum of 200 server instances per Function App and a new instance will only be allocated at most once every 10 seconds. One instance can still handle multiple executions though, so 200 servers usually does not mean 200 concurrent executions.

That said, you can’t really configure a dynamically created server. You’ll have to trust Microsoft that they’re going to temporarily give you a server that meets your needs. And, as you can guess, those needs better be limited. Basically, your need should be that your language environment, such as the .NET Framework (or .NET Core) for C#, is present. One cool thing though, Next to C#, Functions can be written in F# and JavaScript, and Java is coming in v2. There are some other languages that are currently running in v2, like Python, PHP, and TypeScript, but it looks like Microsoft isn’t planning on fully supporting these languages in the near future.

Azure Functions in the Azure Portal

Let’s create our first Azure Functions. Go to App Services and create a new one. When you create an App Service you should get an option to create a Function App (next to Web App, API App, etc.). The creation screen looks pretty much the same as for a regular web app, except that Function Apps have a Consumption Plan as a Hosting Plan (which you should take) and you get the option to create a Storage Account, which is needed for Azure to store your Functions.

Create a new Function App
Create a new Function App

This will create a new Function App, a new Hosting Plan, and a new Storage Account. Once Azure created your resources look up your Function Apps in your Azure resources. You should see your version of “myfunctionsblog” (which should be a unique name). Now, hover over “Functions” and click the big plus to add a Function.

Azure Functions
Azure Functions

In the next form, you can pick a scenario. Our options are “Webhook + API”, “Timer” or “Data processing”. You can also pick a language, “CSharp”, “JavaScript”, “FSharp” or “Java”. Leave the defaults, which are “Webhook + API” and “CSharp” and click the “Create this function” button.

Editing and running your Azure Functions

You now get your function, which is a default template. You can simply run it directly in the Azure portal and you can see a log window, errors and warnings, a console, as well as the request and response bodies. It’s like a very lightweight IDE in Azure right there. I’m not going over the actual code because it’s pretty basic stuff. You can play around with it if you like.

Next to the “Save” and “Run” buttons you see a “</> Get function URL” link. Click it to get the URL to your current function. There are one or more function keys, which give access to just this function); there are one or more host keys, which give access to all functions in the current host; and there’s a master key, which you should never share with third parties. You can manage your keys from the “Manage” item in the menu on the left (with your Functions, Proxies, and Slots).

Consuming Azure Functions

The Function we created is HTTP triggered, meaning we must do an HTTP call ourselves. You can, of course, use a client such as Postman or SoapUI, but let’s look at some C# code to consume our Function. Create a (.NET Core) Console App in Visual Studio (or use my example from GitHub) and paste the following code in Program.cs.

If your Function returns an error (for whatever reason) your best logging tool is Application Insights, but that is not in the scope of this blog post.

Of course, if you have a function that’s triggered by a timer or a queue or something else you don’t need to trigger it manually.

Azure Functions in Visual Studio 2017

Creating a Function in the Azure Portal is cool, but we want an IDE, source control, and CI/CD.  So open up VS2017 and look for the “Azure Functions” template (under Visual C# -> Cloud). You can choose between “Azure Functions v1 (.NET Framework)” and “Azure Functions v2 Preview (.NET Standard)”. We like .NET Standard (which is the common denominator between the .NET Framework, .NET Core, UWP, Mono, and Xamarin) so we pick the v2 Preview.

Again, go with the HTTP trigger and find your Storage Account. Leave the access rights on “Function”. The generated function template is a little bit different than the one generated in the Azure portal, but the result is the same. One thing to note here is that Functions actually use the Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs namespace for triggers, which once again shows the two can (sometimes) be interchanged.

When you run the template you get a console which shows the Azure Functions logo in some nice ASCII art as well as some startup logging. Windows Defender might ask you to allow access for Functions to run, which you should grant.

Now if you run the Console App we created in the previous section and change the functions URL to “http://localhost:7071/api/Function1” (port may vary) you should get the same result as before.

Deployment using Visual Studio

If you’ve read my previous blog posts you should be pretty familiar with this step. Right-click on your Functions project and select “Publish…” from the menu. Select “Select Existing” and enable “Run from ZIP (recommended)”. Deploying from ZIP will put your Function in a read-only state, but it most closely matches your release using CI/CD. Besides, all changes should be made in VS2017 so they’re in source control. In the next form find your Azure App and deploy to Azure.

If you’ve selected Azure Functions v2 earlier you’ll probably get a dialog telling you to update your Functions SDK on Azure. A little warning here, this could mess up already existing functions (in fact, it simply deleted my previous function). As far as I understand this only affects your current Function App, but still use at your own risk.

Once again, find your Functions URL, paste it in the Console App, and check if you get the desired output.

Deployment using VSTS

Now for the good parts, Continuous Integration and Deployment. Open up Visual Studio Team Services and create a new build pipeline. You can pick the default .NET Core template for your pipeline, but you should change the “Publish” task so it publishes “**/FunctionApp.csproj” and not “Publish Web Projects”. You can optionally enable continuous integration in the “Triggers” tab. Once you’re done you can save and queue a build.

The next step is to create a new release pipeline. Select the Azure “App Service deployment” template. Change the name of your pipeline to something obvious, like “Function App CD”. You must now first add your artifact and you may want to enable the continuous deployment trigger. You can also rename your environment to “Dev” or something.

Next, you need to fill out some parameters in your environment tasks. The first thing you need to set is your Azure subscription and authorize it. For “App type” pick the “Function App”. If you’ve successfully authorized your subscription you can select your App Service name from the drop-down. Also, and this one is a little tricky, in your “Azure App Service Deploy” task, disable “Take App Offline” which is hidden under the “Additional Deployment Options”. Once you’re done, and the build is finished, create a new release.

When all goes well, test your changes with the Console App.

If everything works as expected try changing the output of your Function App, push it to source control, and see your build and release pipelines do their jobs. Once again, test the change with your Console App.

Working around some bugs

So… A header that mentions bugs and workarounds is never a good thing. For some reason, my release kept failing due to an “invalid access to memory location”. Probably because I had already deployed the app using VS2017. I also couldn’t delete my function because the trash can icon was disabled. Google revealed I wasn’t the only one with that problem. So anyway, I am currently using a preview of Azure Functions v2 and I’m sure Microsoft will figure this stuff out before it goes out of preview.

Here’s the deal, you probably have to delete your Function App completely (you can still delete it through your App Services). Recreate it, go to your Function App (not the function itself, but the app hosting it, also see the next section on “Additional settings”), and find the “Function app settings”. Over here you can find a switch “~1” and “beta” (which are v1 and v2 respectively). Set it on “beta” here. Now deploy using VSTS. Publishing from VSTS will cause your release to fail again.

Bottom line: don’t use VS2017 to deploy your Function App!

Additional settings

There’s just one more thing I’d like to point out to you. While Azure Functions look different from regular Web Apps and Web APIs they’re still App Services with a Hosting Plan. If you click on your Function App you land on an “Overview” page. From here you can go to your Function app settings (which includes the keys) and your Application settings (which look a lot like Web App settings). You’ll find your Application settings, like “APPINSIGHTS_INSTRUMENTATIONKEY”, “AzureWebJobsDashboard”, “AzureWebJobsStorage” and “FUNCTIONS_EXTENSIONS_VERSION”.

Another tab is the “Platform features” tab, which has properties, settings and code deployment options (see my post Azure Deployment using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and .NET Core for more information on deployment options).

Functions Platform features
Functions Platform features

Wrap up

Azure Functions are pretty cool and I can’t wait for v2 to get out of preview and fully support .NET Standard as well as fix the bugs I mentioned. Now, while Functions may solve some issues, like dynamic scaling, it may introduce some problems as well.

It is possible to create a complete web app using only Azure Functions. Whether you’d want that is another question. Maybe you’ve heard of micro-services. Well, with Functions, think nano-services. A nano-service is often seen as an anti-pattern where the overhead of maintaining a piece of code outweighs the code’s utility. Still, when used wisely, and what’s wise is up to you, Functions can be a powerful, serverless, asset to your toolbox. If you want to know more about the concepts of serverless computing I recommend a blog post by my good friend Sander Knape, who wrote about the AWS equivalent, AWS Lambda, The hidden challenges of Serverless: from VM to function.

Don’t forget to delete your resources if you’re not using them anymore or your credit card will be charged.

Happy coding!

WebJobs in Azure with .NET Core 2.1

The post “WebJobs in Azure with .NET Core 2.1” appeared first on MSDN Azure Development Community.

WebJobs aren’t new to Azure or .NET. There’s even a default Azure WebJob template in Visual Studio 2017 for the full .NET Framework. However, a similar template for WebJobs in .NET Core is somehow missing from Visual Studio. In this post, I’m using .NET Core 2.1.

Creating a WebJob in .NET Core isn’t hard, but you have to know some tricks, especially if you want to use some .NET Core goodies like logging and DI.

In this post, we’re going to build a WebJob and release it to Azure using Visual Studio, the Azure portal, and VSTS.

You can find the code samples for this post on GitHub.

What are WebJobs

A WebJob is a program running in the background of an App Service. It runs in the same context as your web app at no additional cost. Maybe you need to do some hourly task or do some cleanup task every night at 1 AM. Azure Application Insights uses a WebJob to report your app’s statistics.

WebJobs can be scheduled, like hourly or daily, but they can also be triggered. A trigger could be a file upload or a new message on a queue.

WebJobs vs. Functions

I’ve often found comparisons between WebJobs and Azure Functions. In a way, Functions are the successors to WebJobs. Functions are (usually) small pieces of code that run in Azure and are, just like WebJobs, triggered at a certain event, including an HTTP trigger.

Functions are often a great alternative to WebJobs, but if you already have a web app it could make sense to use a WebJob instead. Especially if you want to share code and/or settings between the WebJob and your web app as they run in the same context, which also makes deployment quite easy.

Creating a Storage Account

Before we continue let’s take care of something first. A WebJob requires an Azure Storage Account.  I’ll quickly walk you through the process of creating one.

In Azure, find “Storage Accounts” and add one. You’ll have to pick a name that’s unique across Azure. Other than that you can leave the defaults. We’re talking about cents per GB, so don’t worry about costs too much.

Once your Storage Account is ready, select it and find your “Access keys”. We’ll need one of the two connection strings later.

Creating a WebJob

As said, there’s a WebJob template for the full .NET Framework. I recommend you check it out. Start by creating an ASP.NET Web Application and then add a new WebJob. If you try to create the WebJob right away you’ll get an error saying that the project needs to be saved first (although it does create the WebJob).

We’re here for the .NET Core version of a WebJob though. So start by creating an ASP.NET Core Web Application and then add a new .NET Core Console App project to your solution.

The first thing we need to do to is install the Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs package from NuGet. We should also install Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Extensions. Here’s the catch though, the latest stable versions of these libraries have dependencies on the full .NET Framework so we’re going to need version 3.0.0-beta5 (at the time of this writing), which is fully compatible with .NET Core.

Other NuGet packages we’ll need are Microsoft.Extensions.Options.ConfigurationExtensions (which also gives us the Microsoft.Extensions.Options package, which we also need), Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection and Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Console. Be sure to install version 2.1.0 of these packages because there seems to be a bug in .NET Core 2.1 that prevents you from using packages with patch versions, like 2.1.1.

Join the Program

The next thing we need to do is change our Program.cs file. If you’ve created a WebJob using the .NET Framework template you can simply copy and paste the Program.cs file that was generated there (although you might want to change the namespace).

Adding Configuration and DI

So I promised you’d get all the .NET Core goodies like logging and DI. By default, a Console App doesn’t have any of that, but you can add it yourself.

Next, create an appsettings.json file and set the “Copy to Output Directory” property to “Copy always”. The appsettings.json file should have two connection strings as mentioned in the Program.cs template file. These are the Storage Account connection strings we created earlier.

The next thing we need is a custom IJobActivator that can be used to inject dependencies into our classes. It needs to be set on the JobHostConfiguration in the Program class.

Adding a Trigger

After that, create a class and name it Functions (just like in the WebJob template). The Functions class will have the actual code for our WebJob.

Of course, we’ll need to add a trigger. This is different than the full .NET Framework. After all, the template uses a static method, which makes DI impossible. Speaking of DI, notice that we’ve also added the Functions class itself to the DI container.

For simplicity, we’ll use a TimerTrigger, which is triggered with a so-called CRON expression. This simply means it’s triggered at a certain minute, hour, day, etc. In this example, it triggers every minute.

We’ll also need to configure timers on the JobHostConfiguration.

Running the example

If you did everything correctly, or if you’re running my code from GitHub, you should now be able to run the Console App. If you break on exceptions or if you’re watching the Output window you may notice a lot of StorageExceptions. Don’t worry about them and ignore them. This is a bug in the WebJobs library and will not affect your program. It may take a minute for your trigger to go off, so have a little patience.

If you head over to your Azure Storage Account you should see two Blob Containers, “azure-jobs-host-output” and “azure-webjobs-hosts”. There’s quite a lot going on here, but you can just ignore it. I’ve found that my WebJob triggers wouldn’t go off for some reason, deleting the Blob Containers usually helped. Apparently, there’s some state stored in there which isn’t always disposed of properly when (re-)adding and removing WebJobs.

Deploying to Azure

The next thing we want to do is deploy our WebJob to Azure. In order for a WebJob to run it needs some executable script that it can use to get going. Many file types are supported, but for us Windows users it makes sense to use an exe, cmd, bat or PowerShell file.

A Console App used to be an exe file, but in .NET Core, it produces a regular DLL file that we need to start manually. So, create a file and name it “run.cmd” and make sure that it’s encoded in UTF-8 no BOM (you can check this using something like Notepad++). It just needs a single line of code, which is “dotnet NetCoreWebJob.WebJob.dll”. This runs your Console App. Make sure you set the “Copy to Output Directory” of the file to “Copy always”.

One last thing, for some reason Azure WebJobs needs all the dependencies of a WebJob, which means all .NET Core packages we used to build it. You can do this by editing the csproj file and adding “<CopyLocalLockFileAssemblies>true</CopyLocalLockFileAssemblies>” to the first <PropertyGroup> (underneath “<TargetFramework>”).

Before we can deploy our WebJob we need to deploy our web app. Right-click the ASP.NET project and click “Publish…”. Simply follow the wizard and Visual Studio will deploy your app for you. You can create a new web app or select an existing one. This step isn’t strictly necessary as you can host stand-alone WebJobs, but this should be familiar and it gives you an App Service we can use for our WebJob.

Deploy using Visual Studio

Deploying WebJobs using Visual Studio should be easy as pie. In fact, you probably already know how to do this (don’t do it yet though). Right-click your WebJob project and click “Publish…”. The following wizard looks a whole lot like the publication of a web app, which we just did. You can pick “Select existing” and pick the Azure web app we just created.

Unfortunately, Microsoft messed up this feature in the worst way possible. Visual Studio will deploy the WebJob with the same name as the project, which is “NetCoreWebJob.WebJob”, except the dot is an illegal character in a WebJob name! This messed up my project so bad I had to manually edit it to make my solution working again. Nice one, Microsoft!

So here’s what you do. At the start of the wizard, where you pick either a new or existing App Service, click the arrow next to “Publish immediately” and pick “Create Profile” instead. Now you can first change the name of your WebJob in the settings and deploy after that. Make sure you don’t select “Remove additional files at destination”  or you’ll remove your web app.

Now, browse to the Azure Portal and look up your web app. You’ll find “WebJobs” in the menu. You’ll see your WebJob, but it’s not doing anything. You need to manually run it by selecting it and clicking “Run”. The status should update to “Running”. You can now check out the logs to see that it actually works. You may see an error about the connection strings, but you can ignore those. If you toggle the output you’ll still see a log is written to the console which lets you know it works! If you don’t see a log right away try waiting a minute or two and don’t forget to manually refresh the output.

WebJobs in Azure
WebJobs in Azure

Deploy using the Azure Portal

When you add a new WebJob you’ll need to fill out some options. You can make up some name, set the type to “Triggered” and the triggers to “Manual”. Your alternatives are a “Continuous” WebJob, which just runs and closes (unless you’ve implemented an endless loop in your application); and a “Scheduled” triggered job, which is basically what we have except we’ve implemented the schedule ourselves.

The “File upload” needs a bit of explanation. Here you can upload a zip file that contains your WebJob. So head over to Visual Studio and build your solution. Then go to the output folder of your WebJob project, something like “MyProject\bin[Debug|Release]\netcoreapp2.1”, and put everything in that folder into a zip file. Then select it in the “File upload” in your new WebJob.

Add WebJob
Add WebJob

It will take a few seconds for Azure to create your WebJob so keep refreshing until it pops up. After that, you have to start it manually again and you can check out the logs.

Deploy using VSTS

Ultimately, we want to add our WebJob to our CI/CD pipeline in VSTS. Unfortunately, this functionality doesn’t come out of the box. Luckily, it’s not very difficult either. If you’re not familiar with builds or releases in VSTS check out one of my previous blogs Azure Deployment using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and .NET Core or ARM Templates to Deploy your Resources to Azure.

When you’re in the Azure Portal find the “App Service Editor (Preview)” of your App Service. This lets you browse all the files in your App Service. One thing we notice is that your WebJob is located in “App_Data\jobs\triggered[WebJob name]”. And since your WebJob is really just the output of the WebJob project build it’s simply a matter of copying your WebJob files to App_Data.

WebJob file location
WebJob file location

The build

So go to VSTS and create a new build. Select your repository, your branch, and select “ASP.NET Core” as a template. We only need to change two things here. We need to change the existing “Publish” task and add a new “.NET Core” task to publish our WebJob.

Change the name of the existing publish task to “Publish web app”, untick the “Publish Web Projects” checkbox, and enter the “Path to project(s)”, which is “**/NetCoreWebJob.csproj”. Also, untick the “Zip Published Projects” and “Add project name to publish path” checkboxes as they will eventually mess up our release.

After that create a new .NET Core task, set the “Command” to “publish” and change the name of the task to “Publish web job”. Again, untick “Publish Web Projects” and set the “Path to project(s)”, which is “**/NetCoreWebJob.WebJob.csproj”. And once again, don’t zip the published projects or add the project name to the publish path. The last step here is the “Arguments” field, which can be copy/pasted from the other publish step, except we’re going to add a bit to it: “–configuration $(BuildConfiguration) –output $(build.artifactstagingdirectory)\App_Data\jobs\triggered\WebJobVSTS”.

VSTS WebJob build
VSTS WebJob build

The release

Last, but not least, is the release. Create a new release in VSTS, pick the “Azure App Service deployment” template and fill in the blanks, which is an artifact and your Azure settings in the Environment. Because we’re not zipping our build we just need to change one setting. In the “Deploy Azure App Service” task is a “Package or folder” setting, which has a default of “[…]/*.zip” which obviously isn’t going to work. Instead, use the browser (the button with “…”) and select your drop folder.

Save it, hit new release and pick your latest build. If all goes well you should see your new WebJob in the Azure Portal!

Wrap up

Hopefully, Microsoft will come with a built-in solution for creating, consuming, and deploying WebJobs to Azure in .NET Core soon. Until that time it’s not particularly difficult, it’s just a matter of knowing what to do.

In this post, we’ve seen the TimerTrigger, but there’s a QueueTrigger, a BlobTrigger, and a FileTrigger as well. Experiment, google, and read the official documentation.

Don’t forget to delete your resources.

Happy coding!

Azure Deployment using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and .NET Core

Hey all,
After three years of radio silence I decided to write a new blog post *crowd goes wild*! A lot has happened since my last post. I wrote a book on Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment (with JavaScript and Jenkins, mostly); got a Microsoft Azure certificate; found a new job using those Azure skills; and I got my own company on the side. Three years ago I ended with a blog series on math, but I’m not finishing that. Apologies if you were really looking forward to #4… My new focus, for now, will mainly be Microsoft Azure, Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), and C# .NET Core. So without further delay, let’s talk about those!

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure has been around for a few years now and you’ve probably heard of it. It’s the Microsoft cloud platform that competes directly with Amazon’s AWS and Google’s Google Cloud. If you don’t really know what “the cloud” is (besides the pretty hyped buzzword) I suggest you really look into it as I believe it’s the future (heck, it’s the present)! If you do not already have an account I suggest you create one. It’s free and you only need a credit card and a Microsoft email account like hotmail or outlook.

Beware, Azure is free for now. You get free credit which is valid for one month. Some services cost a monthly fee, for others you pay per use. Just having an empty Azure account is always free. In this post we’re going to host a default web application in Azure using an App Service (which, in any case, will cost you close to nothing).

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)

VSTS is Microsoft’s cloud version of Team Foundation Service (TFS), which is their tool for continuous integration and deployment, source control, and agile tools like SCRUM and Kanban boards. Again, if you do not yet have a subscription I recommend you create one. Just like with Azure it’s free and you need a Microsoft email address, like hotmail or outlook. For the free version of VSTS you get quite a bit of functionality, like 240 free build minutes per month and unlimited free private Git repositories (always use Git, never Team Foundation Service Control (TFSC)). With an MSDN subscription you get some extra functionality, but the free tier is good enough for this post.

.NET Core

Do I really need to explain this? For the last few years Microsoft has focused on .NET Core, an open source multi-platform subset of the .NET Framework. While it still has some issues, even in the latest .NET Core 2.1 release, it’s also pretty cool and I’m already using it for production software. It’s a bit different than the full .NET Framework, but not a lot. You may have to download and install the latest SDK, which can all be found on the .NET Core GitHub page. Visual Studio support for .NET Core starts from Visual Studio 2017, so be sure you’re up to date, otherwise you can probably follow along with a regular .NET Framework ASP.NET Web Application.

Creating a .NET Core project

So let’s put these tools together. We start by creating a new (private) project in VSTS, which is pretty simple. In fact, you probably already created one when you created a VSTS account. I kept the default, MyFirstProject. When you browse to the Code tab of your project in VSTS you can initialize your repository (at the bottom of the page) with a README.md file and a .gitignore file (choose Visual Studio).

Initialize a repository in VSTS
Initialize a repository in VSTS.

You can copy the link or clone directly into Visual Studio on the next page in the right upper corner under the “Clone” button. I’m assuming you know how Git works, so I’m not covering that here.

Once you have the repository locally we can start by adding some code. Since we’re focusing on deploying to Azure using VSTS it doesn’t really matter what code you have, so just create an ASP.NET Core Web Application in Visual Studio 2017. You can pick a regular Web Application (which will use Razor View Pages by default) or a Model-View-Controller project, whichever you fancy. Once the default web application template loads you can commit and push it to your Git repository and we can start the fun!

Azure App Services

For the next step we’re going to mess around in Azure a bit. Log in to your Azure portal and find your App Services. Simply click the “Add” button, pick a “Web App” and hit “Create”. On the next page you can set some settings for your web app, such as the URL at which your app will be hosted (which always ends at .azurewebsites.net).

New Azure Web App
New Azure Web App

You’ll also have to create a resource group or pick an existing one. A resource group is simply a way to group certain resources for a quick overview. For example, you can have a separate resource group for dev, test, acceptance and production or for your customer portal and your internal tools, it’s all up to you.

The most important setting here is the App Service Plan/Location. This is basically a server that you pay for. A new plan is generated for you, but you can create your own as well. You have different price tiers with different hardware specifications and Azure functionality, like CPU, memory, custom domains, staging slots, and daily backups.

The location of your plan determines where the server is physically located. For me, in the Netherlands, West Europe is ideal because I know it’s in Amsterdam. Just go with the default Standard S1 plan. Even if you don’t have free credits you can delete it after you’ve read this blog post and it will only cost you like $0.03, so don’t worry about costs.

Setting up deployment from Azure

For now we’re staying in Azure. You’ve probably seen the “Build and Release” button in VSTS. That’s where you can create new build and deployment pipelines, which is great, but also a bit of work.

A build pipeline can automatically build and test your software after a push to Git. This includes restoring NuGet packages, minifying and bundling any HTML, CSS and JavaScript you might have, executing task runners and basically anything you’d ever need to make your software build and run. When your latest commit is built and tested VSTS can create an artifact for publication.

The deployment pipeline can download the artifact from a build pipeline and put it in Azure (or on your own on-premise servers). The trigger for a deployment is usually that a build has succeeded, but can also be a push to Git or a manual trigger.

When you’re building and testing your software automatically this is called Continuous Integration (or CI) and when your software is also automatically deployed this is called Continuous Deployment (or CD). There’s something in between, which holds off the deployment until a user explicitly presses a button and gives the “okay” sign, this is called Continuous Delivery. When you’re doing both CI and Continuous Delivery and/or Deployment you’re doing “CI/CD”.

Let’s set this up with pretty much a single button click. You’ve got two options in Azure. In your Web App, either configure deployment from the “Deployment options” menu item or use the newer “Deployment Center (Preview)” which, as the name suggests, is still in preview.

Deployment options in Azure
Deployment options in Azure

Deployment options

It’s really so simple I’m not even sure if I should walk you through the next steps. Click the “Deployment options” menu item and simply fill in the options you want to use.

Deployment settings in Azure
Deployment settings in Azure

And that’s that. If you now browse to the Deployment options in your Web App you’ll see that Azure now shows all your commits. If you push a new commit to your repository you can even see the build status in Azure because Azure linked it to your VSTS account.

Continuous deployment in Azure
Continuous deployment in Azure

When deployment is done, browse to your Azure website (for me that’s imunique.azurewebsites.net) and behold, your website is up and running! Try changing something on the homepage, push it to Git, wait a few minutes, and see your website get updated.

Deployment Center (Preview)

My guess is that Microsoft is planning to replace the “Deployment options” with the “Deployment Center (Preview)”. If you have already set up CI/CD with the Deployment options you’ll see your commits in here too. For the purpose of this blog we’re going to “Disconnect” (button in the top menu).

Now go to the Deployment Center (Preview) and you should see various source control options, like VSTS, Github and Bitbucket. It’s a little more visually appealing than most Azure panels. So pick VSTS and continue. Next, you have to pick a build provider. I have zero experience with Kudu, so pick “VSTS Continuous Delivery” (which somehow isn’t the default).

Deployment center in Azure
Deployment center in Azure

In the next panel you can pick your VSTS account and repository. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this blog there seems to be a bug here which prevents me from picking an account. It worked in the past and the Azure team said they have fixed the problem in an upcoming release (which is pretty often)… So try it our yourself as this may work for you!

Anyway, if you continue, Azure creates a build pipeline and a deployment pipeline in VSTS! Now that’s pretty cool. It gives you complete control over your builds and deployments as you can tweak them however you like. At the same time the Deployment Center now shows you which builds have been deployed.

Pipelines in VSTS

So browse to your VSTS and check out the build. The user interface isn’t always intuitive, but you should be able to find it. You can edit the build and click around a bit. You shouldn’t need to change it, but you can.

VSTS build
VSTS build

The deployment is a little different. There’s just one build for every piece of code, but there can be multiple deployments, for example for your entire DTAP street (dev, test, acceptance, and production). Azure created a release with a single environment, “Dev”.

VSTS release
VSTS release

You can change the deployment in the “Tasks” for that environment (either click the Dev tile or select Tasks in the upper menu). The tasks look kind of similar to the VSTS build and can be (completely) different for each environment. Mostly, your tasks will be more or less the same and you’ll only have some values that differ per environment. You can use “Variables” for these different values, but that’s out of the scope of this post.

It’s also pretty easy to clone an entire environment (including it’s tasks and variables). Just hover over the tile of the environment you’d like to clone and a “Clone” button will show up. Click it and you get a new environment that’s exactly like the one you cloned. Further setup of builds and releases is out of scope of this post, but you can click around if you like.

When you’re done playing around simply delete the release and the build pipelines (in that order). Also make sure you disconnect the deployment in the Azure Deployment Center.

Deployment from Visual Studio 2017

Finally, let’s switch back to Visual Studio. You can do the exact same thing in Visual Studio. Right click on the project you want to release (which is your web project) and choose “Overview” in the drop down menu. In the page that opens go to “Publish” (in the menu on the left).

Here you can publish or set up your CI/CD. Click the “Start” button under “Continuous Delivery” and you can once again choose a VSTS subscription and an App Service (it creates a new App Service by default, but you can also select an existing one). Simply clicking the “Ok” button will have the same outcome as what we did in the Deployment Center. It will create a new build and deployment pipeline that is also visible in your Deployment Center. Pretty cool!

Going back to the Publish page in Visual Studio, you can also just publish directly. This is pretty useful if you want to release something to Azure right now. Simply click the “Start” button under “Publish”. You can now either create a new Azure App Service or pick an existing one. Just follow the wizard and your application will be published to Azure directly, without a build or deployment pipeline. Be careful though, your local build will be deployed, which will often be different than a build from the build server.

Wrap up

So there you have it! Deployment was never this easy! In just a couple of minutes we’ve created an application, put it in source control, and deployed it to the cloud, ready for the world to see (you can restrict access, but that’s out of scope). In the past it could take you hours to set up a new server (or days and even weeks if you still had to order one), but this alternative is a lot faster and cheaper.

The next step is using ARM (Azure Resource Management) templates to automatically create App Services and other Azure resources. Check out my post on ARM templates to get started.

Don’t forget to delete your App Service and your App Service plan or you’ll be charged for them!

Good luck and happy coding!

Apply, Call and Bind on JavaScript functions

I’m a bit short on time this week so I’ll keep it short. Last week I talked about Prototype in JavaScript, a fundamental JavaScript feature that too few programmers know about. Today I’d like to talk about a few more features that people either don’t know about or are confused about, apply(), call() and bind().

As usual I have the examples on GitHub in the apply-call-bind repository.

Also, in case you missed it, I have a free Udemy course on ReactJS and Flux for you. Only 50, so you best be quick to get it!

Function invocation

So let’s talk a bit about functions and how they can be invoked. Let’s look at a simple function with a simple invocation.

var sum = function (a, b) {
    return a + b;
};
var x = sum(1, 2);
console.log(x);

It doesn’t get simpler than this and x will have the expected value of 3. Let’s make that slightly less simple. We want to be able to add an undefined number of numbers! So how would we handle that? How about this?

var sum = function (numbers) {
    var result = 0;
    numbers.forEach(function(n) {
        result += n;
    });
    return result;
};
var x = sum([1, 2, 3, 4]);
console.log(x);

That looks good, right? Unfortunately, invoking the function is now more difficult as we always need an array. What if I told you there is another way?

Remember that this is JavaScript and JavaScript is, well, weird. We can call a function with any number of input parameters we want. Too few and our function might fail, too much and the extra parameters will be ignored.
There is sense in all this though. Within each function you can inspect the input parameters through an array-like object, arguments.

Let’s rewrite the first version of sum, but using the arguments list this time.

var sum = function () {
    return arguments[0] + arguments[1];
};
var x = sum(1, 2);
console.log(x);

But if we can do that we can use ANY number of parameters! Arguments is array-like, which mean we can loop through the values (it doesn’t have a forEach method though).

var sum = function () {
    var result = 0;
    var i = 0;
    for (i; i < arguments.length; i++) {
        result += arguments[i];
    }
    return result;
};
var x = sum(1, 2, 3, 4);
console.log(x);

That’s pretty nice! We can now use the same simple syntax for any number, or a variable number, of input parameters. So now I’m going to be a real pain in the ass… We got this nice function that takes any number of parameters in the plain and simple syntax we’re used to, but… I want to pass in an array!

Apply

If I were your manager you’d be annoyed at best. I asked for plain and simple syntax, you deliver, and now I want an array after all!? Worry not! Your function is awesome and it can stay. What we’re going to use is a function on the function prototype (meaning all function objects have this function defined), apply.

So that sounded weird… Functions have functions? Yes they do! Remember that a function in JavaScript is just an object. To give you an idea, this is how it looks.

myFunc(); // Invocation of a function.
myFunc.someFunc(); // Invocation of a function on a function.

So let’s look at this function, apply, which allows you to pass input parameters to any function as an array. Apply has two input parameters, the object on which you want to invoke the function (or the object this points to in the function) and the array with input parameters to the function.

So let’s invoke our function, sum, using apply. Notice that the first parameter can be null as we’re not invoking sum on an object.

var x = sum.apply(null, [1, 2, 3, 4]);
console.log(x);

So that’s awesome, right? Let’s look at an example that doesn’t use the arguments variable.

var steve = {
    firstName: 'Steve',
    lastName: 'Ballmer',
    doThatThing: function (what) {
        console.log(this.firstName + ' ' + this.lastName
        + ': ' + what + '! ' + what + '! ' + what + '!');
    }
};
steve.doThatThing.apply(null, ['Developers']);
steve.doThatThing.apply(steve, ['Developers']);

So in this example the function doThatThing is just a regular function with a regular named input parameter and we can still invoke it using apply. In this case we also need to pass in the first parameter to set this. If we don’t specify the first parameter firstName and lastName in the function will be undefined.

We can also put in another variable as first input parameter.

var sander = {
    firstName: 'Sander',
    lastName: 'Rossel'
};
steve.doThatThing.apply(sander, ['Blogs']);

That’s a bit weird, isn’t it? Even though Sander does not have the doThatThing function we can invoke it as if Sander did. This can be very useful behavior as we’ll see in the next section!

Call

Another function, which looks like apply, is call. Call allows you to simply invoke a function, but makes you specify the object which serves as this within the function, much like apply. The only difference between apply and call is the manner in which input parameters are supplied. Apply needs an array with values, call needs the values separated by a comma (like regular function invocations).

steve.doThatThing.call(null, 'Developers');
steve.doThatThing.call(steve, 'Developers');
steve.doThatThing.call(sander, 'Blogs');

So why would you want to do this? It seems it only obfuscates the code… Consider the following scenario, you have some function that takes a callback as input and invokes it.

var someFunc = function (callback) {
    console.log('this is ' + this);
    callback('This');
};
someFunc(steve.doThatThing);

What will it print? Undefined undefined… Sure, when doThatThing is invoked as callback() this will be the global Window object. We have three options now… I’ll discuss two now and I’ll give the third in a minute.
So first we could make it so that this is not used in the callback. For this we’d need to create a closure, or a new function that invokes doThatThing on steve as if it were a normal function.

someFunc(function (what) {
    steve.doThatThing(what);
});

It works, but its a lot of bloated code, so we don’t really want that. So there’s a second option, we allow the this object to be passed to the someFunc as an input parameter. And then we can invoke the function on that object using call (or apply)!

var someFuncThis = function (callback, thisArg) {
    callback.call(thisArg, 'This');
};
someFuncThis(steve.doThatThing, steve);

A lot of JavaScript libraries and frameworks, like jQuery and Knockout.js, use this pattern, passing in this as an optional input parameter.

Bind

If you’ve been paying attention you’ll remember I just said there was a third method to solve our little problem with this in the callback function. Next to apply and call functions also have a bind function. Bind is a function that takes an object as input parameter and returns another function. The function that is returned invokes the original function with the input object as this context. Let’s just look at an example.

someFunc(steve.doThatThing.bind(steve));
someFunc(steve.doThatThing.bind(sander));

And it even works if your original this isn’t the function itself.

var f = steve.doThatThing;
f = f.bind(steve);
someFunc(f);

You’ll need this when passing JavaScript native functions as callbacks to third party libraries.

someFunc(console.log);
someFunc(console.log.bind(console));

The first call fails with an “Illegal invocation” because this inside the log function has to be console, but it isn’t if it’s invoked as callback. The second line works as we’ve bound this to console.

So here are three functions that all invoke a function slightly differently than what you’re used to. All three are indispensable when you’re doing serious JavaScript development though.

If you’d like to know more about functions and how they work in JavaScript I can recommend JavaScript Succinctly.
We’ve also seen a lot of trouble with the this keyword. If you’re wondering why, you should check out this six day course by Derick Bailey: The Rules For Mastering JavaScript’s “this”. I can highly recommend it!

This blog is a bit shorter than usual, but, as they say, it’s quality over quantity. Hope to see you back again next week!

Happy coding!

Prototype in JavaScript

Hey everyone. It’s been a few weeks since I last blogged. I’ve been on a vacation in Poland which was awesome! If you ever want to visit Poland I recommend visiting Gdańsk, a beautiful city, and Malbork Castle, the largest castle in the world!
Anyway, this blog isn’t about travel, it’s about programming, and prototype in JavaScript in particular!

So last time I finished my series on the MEAN stack, MongoDB, Express, AngularJS and Node.js. That meant a lot of JavaScript. Not just front-end, but also back-end. Next to my blog I’ve been writing a lot of JavaScript in my daily life too. And while writing all that JavaScript there was one thing I just didn’t quite understand, prototype. I’m not talking about the library with the same name, which kind of lost the battle for most popular all round JavaScript library to jQuery, I’m talking about prototypal object inheritance. I started asking around. I know some full-stack developers with years of experience in front- and back-end, but guess what? They didn’t fully understand it either! And then I went to look on the interwebs, but guess what? There just aren’t that many good prototype tutorials around. And that’s what this post is all about.

You can find the full code with examples on my GitHub in the repository for this post.

Prototype, you don’t really need it…

So when asking my friends why, after all these years, they still didn’t know prototype their answer was something along the lines of “I never needed it.” Sure, that was the reason I never looked into it before too. Truth is that you can write JavaScript apps and libraries without ever needing it. But if you want to write fast JavaScript code you better start using it!

So first of all, what is prototype and why is using it better than not using it? In JavaScript each function has a prototype property. Prototype has all the, I guess you could call it default, methods and properties that an object, created through that function using the ‘new’ keyword, should have. As we know any object in JavaScript can have any method or property, we can just define them at runtime as we go. And that’s probably the big difference between using it and not using it. With prototype you define methods design time, or up front.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say I have a Person object, the constructor and usage could look as follows.

var Person = function (firstName, lastName) {
    var self = this;
    self.firstName = firstName;
    self.lastName = lastName;
    self.fullName = function () {
        return self.firstName + ' ' + self.lastName;
    };
};

var p = new Person('Sander', 'Rossel');
console.log(p.fullName());

So what happens when we call new Person(‘Sander’, ‘Rossel’)? First, two new instances of String are created, ‘Sander’ and ‘Rossel’.

Second, a new object is created. After that the object, representing a Person, gets three new properties, firstName and lastName, which are assigned the two strings, and the function fullName, for which a new function is instantiated. That last part is crucial, a new function instance is created every time you create a new person object. Now performance and memory wise this isn’t optimal. Let’s see how we can optimize this.

var Person = function (firstName, lastName) {
    var self = this;
    self.firstName = firstName;
    self.lastName = lastName;
};

var getFullName = function (person) {
    return person.firstName + ' ' + person.lastName;
};

var p = new Person('Sander', 'Rossel');
console.log(getFullName(p));

This time the function getFullName is created once and can be used for any instance of Person.

The benchmark

Don’t believe me? Let’s test that.

'use strict';

var benchmark = function(description, callback) {
    var start = new Date().getTime();
    for (var i = 0; i < 10000000; i++) {
        callback();
    }
    console.log(description + ' took: ' + (new Date().getTime() - start));
};

var Person = function (firstName, lastName) {
    var self = this;
    self.firstName = firstName;
    self.lastName = lastName;
    self.fullName = function () {
        return self.firstName + ' ' + self.lastName;
    };
};

var PersonNoFullName = function (firstName, lastName) {
    var self = this;
    self.firstName = firstName;
    self.lastName = lastName;
};

var getFullName = function (person) {
    return person.firstName + ' ' + person.lastName;
};

benchmark('Full name', function () {
    var p = new Person('Sander', 'Rossel');
    var n = p.fullName();
});

benchmark('No full name', function () {
    var p = new PersonNoFullName('Sander', 'Rossel');
    var n = getFullName(p);
});

That’s a bit of code, but what happens is that we create 10.000.000 (that’s ten million) instances of Person with the fullName function defined on the Person object and we create ten million instances of a Person without the fullName function and use the pre-defined getFullName function instead. Then we log the time both methods took.

It may surprise you, but the result I get differs greatly per browser. Here they are (times in milliseconds):

                IE      FF      Chrome
Full name:      3705    361     2805
No full name:   3121    21      222

What this shows is that Firefox is fastest by far and IE is, of course, really very slow, especially when it comes to the method without full name. All browsers are considerably faster (especially Chrome) using the getFullName method though.

Enter prototype

Now that we’ve seen that functions in your constructors aren’t really optimal, especially when they don’t use any internal state of an object, and that we’ve seen how to optimize that let’s look at a better way, prototype.

The use of an external function doesn’t feel right. Full name should be part of your Person object, but now we have to call some external function to get it. That’s where prototype comes in. Functions in JavaScript have a prototype property. Prototype defines static methods, like getFullName, and ‘pastes’ them on your objects through prototypal inheritance.

var PersonProto = function (firstName, lastName) {
    var self = this;
    self.firstName = firstName;
    self.lastName = lastName;
};

PersonProto.prototype.fullName = function () {
    return this.firstName + ' ' + this.lastName;
};

And that’s really all there is to it! We have now defined the fullName function on PersonProto’s prototype, which means every instance of PersonProto now gets the fullName function.

var p = new PersonProto('Sander', 'Rossel');
var n = p.fullName();

If we’d benchmark this we’d get about the same speed as we got earlier when using the getFullName function (really, try it).

To Prototype or not to Prototype…

You might be tempted to think it doesn’t matter whether you use a static method like getFullName or prototype, other than the manner in which you invoke the function (object.function() vs. function(object)). That isn’t true though, prototype has a few pros and cons compared to other methods. First of all, by using it, we’ve lost control over ‘this’. Earlier, when defining fullName in the constructor we could use ‘self’, which always points to the correct instance of Person. We’ve lost that benefit with prototype and ‘this’ is now dependent on the context in which the function was invoked. Below code will break.

var p = new PersonProto('Sander', 'Rossel');
console.log(p.fullName());
var fn = p.fullName;
console.log(fn());

While the following code will work just fine.

var p = new Person('Sander', 'Rossel');
console.log(p.fullName());
var fn = p.fullName;
console.log(fn());

It’s the same code on the outside, but fullName of Person points to ‘self’ while fullName of PersonProto points to this (which, in the second call, is ‘window’).

Another pro, maybe, is that prototypal functions cannot be deleted from an object (although they can be overwritten). The first bit will run fine and prints ‘Sander Rossel’, the second part will break.

var p = new PersonProto('Sander', 'Rossel');
delete p.fullName;
console.log(p.fullName());

// This will break.
// fullName is no longer defined after a delete.
var p = new Person('Sander', 'Rossel');
delete p.fullName;
console.log(p.fullName());

And remember that prototype objects are static, which means they’re shared by all instances of an object. You can overwrite the value per instance though.

PersonProto.prototype.friends = [];
var p1 = new PersonProto('Sander', 'Rossel');
var p2 = new PersonProto('Bill', 'Gates');
p1.friends.push(p2);
console.log(p1.friends[0].fullName() + ' is a friend of ' + p1.fullName());
console.log(p2.friends[0].fullName() + ' is a friend of ' + p2.fullName());

Guess what, because the friends array is static Bill Gates is now also a friend of himself, even though I only added him to my own friends.

Inheritance

One big pro to using prototype is inheritance. One object can inherit the prototype of another object. The ‘pseudoclassical’ way to do this is by copying the prototype object.

var Employee = function (firstName, lastName, salary) {
    var self = this;
    self.firstName = firstName;
    self.lastName = lastName;
    self.salary = salary;
};

Employee.prototype = PersonProto.prototype;

Employee.prototype.getSalary = function () {
    return this.fullName() + ' earns ' + this.salary;
};

So we have an Employee with a salary and, of course, a name. An Employee is actually just a Person with a salary. So we ‘inherit’ the prototype of PersonProto. We also define a new function on the prototype, getSalary. Unfortunately, while Employee now has the fullName function, this has some undesired side effects…

var e = new Employee('Sander', 'Rossel', 1000000); // I wish :-)
console.log(e.getSalary());

var p = new PersonProto('Sander', 'Rossel');
console.log(p.getSalary());

That’s right, PersonProto now also has a getSalary function! That’s because Employee.prototype == PersonProto.prototype. So once we add getSalary to Employee.prototype PersonProto now has it too.

We can fix this by creating a temporary constructor, assigning the prototype to the temporary constructor, instantiating an object using the temporary constructor and assigning that to the prototype of the inheriting object. Last, because a prototype is assigned to the constructor function, we must set the prototype’s constructor to the inheriting constructor.

var Temp = function () {};
Temp.prototype = PersonProto.prototype;
Employee.prototype = new Temp();
Employee.prototype.constructor = Employee;

Employee.prototype.getSalary = function () {
    return this.fullName() + ' earns ' + this.salary;
};

Alright, so I agree that’s pretty arcane! Luckily you can put this in a function so you only have to write it once.

var inherit = function (inheritor, inherited) {
    var Temp = function () {};
    Temp.prototype = inherited.prototype;
    inheritor.prototype = new Temp();
    inheritor.prototype.constructor = inheritor;
};
inherit(Employee, PersonProto);

And you can also see that Employee is actually also a PersonProto.

if (e instanceof Employee) {
    console.log('e is an instance of Employee.'); 
}

if (e instanceof PersonProto) {
    console.log('e is an instance of PersonProto.');
}

Object.create

Another method to create an object with a specific prototype is by using the Object.create function.

var o = Object.create(PersonProto.prototype);
o.firstName = 'Sander';
o.lastName = 'Rossel';
console.log(o.fullName());

So here o has the PersonProto prototype and o is of the type PersonProto. Now let’s use Object.create for inheritance like we’ve seen above (for this example I’ve created an Employee2 which is similar to Employee).

Employee2.prototype = Object.create(PersonProto.prototype);
Employee2.prototype.constructor = Employee2;

Employee2.prototype.getSalary = function () {
    return this.fullName() + ' earns ' + this.salary;
};

var e = new Employee2('Sander', 'Rossel', 1000000); // I wish :-)
console.log(e.getSalary());

And there you have it.

Prototype vs. __proto__

As I said before prototype kind of ‘glues’ the static functions to the object instances you create. This happens through the proto property each object instance has. Each instance of an object has a proto property defined, which is constructed using the constructor.prototype. So while object literals don’t have a prototype property they do have a proto property which you can use to dynamically extend the prototype of an object.

var p = {
    firstName: 'Sander',
    lastName: 'Rossel'
};

if (p.__proto__ === Object.prototype) {
    console.log('__proto__ points to the constructors prototype.');
}

// Highly discouraged!
p.__proto__.fullName = function () {
    return this.firstName + ' ' + this.lastName;
};

console.log(p.fullName());
delete p.fullName;
console.log(p.fullName());

So by adding fullName to o.proto we’ve actually added fullName to Object.prototype! That means ALL your objects now have a fullName function.

var i = 10;
console.log(i.fullName());

See why doing that is highly discouraged? It’s slow to boot. I just thought you should know about it.

Beware, fellow traveler!

So that’s it! I have some final remarks for you before you go and use this knowledge out in the wild.
Don’t change the prototype of built-in types such as Object and Array. You could do this to support new functionality in older browsers, but there are probably a few libraries that already do that for you.

Prototype can have a negative impact on performance. What happened when we called fullName on Employee? The JavaScript engine looks for fullName on the object, but could not find it. It then looked for fullName on the Employee prototype, but again couldn’t find it. It works its way down the prototype chain and looked in the PersonProto prototype next, where it found fullName and called it. You can imagine that having huge inheritance chains can be bad for performance (but why would you have huge chains anyway?).

Last, as I said before, you can use JavaScript without ever needing prototype. Likewise, you can inherit objects without the need for prototype. For example, you can create a function Employee that creates a Person, adds the salary property and the getSalary function, and returns that.

Wrap up

And here’s some additional reading. First, of course, we have JavaScript Succinctly, which explain the various types, objects and functions, including prototype and inheritance.
And if you have some money to spare I can recommend one of the following books: Object-Oriented JavaScript by Packt Publishing or The Principles Of Object-Oriented JavaScript by No Starch Press.

Happy coding!

MEAN web development #9: Some last remarks

So by now we’ve seen the full MEAN stack, MongoDB, Express, AngularJS and Node.js. Additionally we’ve seen the templating engine Jade in action as well as used Socket.io for real time web applications. If you combine that with my earlier series on ‘vanilla’ web development you’re already a pretty versatile web developer (well, dependent on how much you practiced)!
In case you missed a MEAN article, here they are:

  1. MEAN web development #1: MEAN, the what and why
  2. MEAN web development #2: Node.js in the back
  3. MEAN web development #3: More Node.js
  4. MEAN web development #4: All aboard the Node.js Express!
  5. MEAN web development #5: Jade and Express
  6. MEAN web development #6: AngularJS in the front
  7. MEAN web development #7: MongoDB and Mongoose
  8. MEAN web development #8: Sockets will rock your socks!
  9. MEAN web development #9: Some last remarks

In this post I’m going to discuss one topic we haven’t covered yet, deployment. Next to that I’m going to give you some alternatives for the technologies we’ve covered in this series.

There is no GitHub repository for this article as there won’t be any code samples.

Deploying a Node.js application

So we haven’t talked about deployment yet. Not even in my web development series. To be honest, deploying software is not what I do, I just write them. Besides, deploying to the Windows laptop you’ve used to build your software is a bit difficult and in most cases isn’t even close to actual deployment. Unfortunately I don’t have any spare web servers laying around 🙂
That isn’t to say I can’t point you in the right direction.

Node.js is a little different from what you’re used to. Consider the PHP application we wrote earlier in Web development #4: PHP in the back. We wrote our page and got it up and running using XAMPP, where we specified the port and other settings. The PHP file didn’t do anything. Likewise, a C# web application doesn’t do anything until you host it using IIS, which can be configured however you like.
That’s different for a Node.js application. After all we specify the server, where it should run and how it should run in our JavaScript file. And then we could run it from the console. On production environments we really don’t want to run a console though. We probably want to host our application on port 80, which is the default HTTP port, which requires an elevated command prompt. So someone with admin rights should log on to the server to (re)start our Node.js app every time something happens (either the app crashes or the machine is restarted). That doesn’t sound very appealing…

So we could simply write some command script using a loop that restarts Node.js whenever it crashes and start that up, with elevated privileges, either using a service or the built-in scheduler. That solution has some serious limitations though. What if your app goes in an unrecoverable state, making it crash in a loop? Or what if, for some reason, it hogs up all of your memory? A command prompt can’t really give you a detailed log of what’s happening with your application.

That sounds really tiresome and messed up. Luckily there is a better alternative. You can use PM2 (Process Manager 2) to run Node.js (PM2 on GitHub). PM2 can run other scripts such as PHP, CoffeeScript and Ruby as well and it works on Linux, MacOSx and Windows.
You can install PM2 using npm (npm install pm2 -g). Make sure to add  the -g to make a global install. Now you can simply start any Node.js app by running “pm2 start node_app.js”. “pm2 list” will show a list with running applications. Then you can generate a startup script with “pm2 startup” to automatically start your apps on a computer reboot (which unfortunately doesn’t work on Windows, so I haven’t been able to test it). “pm2 monit” will show you some statistics on the current status of your applications.
Next to that PM2 has a deployment system, log management, a development tool (similar to nodemon which we’ve been using in this series), cluster mode (for running on multiple CPU’s, remember Node.js is single threaded) and much more which you can all use as well.

There are some alternatives to PM2, such as forever, but something completely different is to run your Node.js app as a Windows service. You can do this by using NSSM (the Non-Sucking Service Manager) and winser. You can download NSSM from their website and you can install winser using npm (npm install winser). Then you should add the following lines to your package.json:

"scripts": {
    "postinstall": "winser -i -s -c",
    "preuninstall": "winser -r -x -s",
}

Now in the command prompt browse to the folder that contains the package.json and execute “node_modules.bin\winser -i”. You have now installed your Node.js application as a service. To uninstall execute “node_modules.bin\winser -r”.

So I know that’s not much, but at least these are some considerations when deploying a Node.js application.

HTTPS/SSL

You might want to deploy your application using HTTPS for secure SSL-encrypred traffic. For this you’re going to need some certificates, which I dont have. Node.js has an https module, just like it has a http module. So now it shouldn’t be too difficult to write yourself an HTTPS enabled Node.js server.

var https = require('https');
var fs = require('fs');

var options = {
    key: fs.readFileSync('some-key.pem'),
    cert: fs.readFileSync('some-certificate.pem')
};

var server = https.createServer(options, function (req, res) {
    // Stuff...
});
server.listen(80, '127.0.0.1');

And here’s how you can use Express to handle HTTPS.

var app = require('express')();
var https = require('https');
var fs = require('fs');

var options = {
 key: fs.readFileSync('some-key.pem'),
 cert: fs.readFileSync('some-certificate.pem')
};

// Stuff...

var server = https.createServer(options, app`);
server.listen(80, '127.0.0.1');

And now you also know why you should use packages for your routing, you may want to re-use them.

MEAN alternatives

In this series we’ve seen the MEAN stack: MongoDB, Express, AngularJS and Node.js. It offers an alternative to the traditional LAMP stack, Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP and the Microsoft stack with .NET and IIS. The baseline here is that we programmers just like to come up with cool or clever sounding acronyms. As I said before you can have a perfectly good MEN stack, leaving out the AngularJS. Or put in some Jade, or Sockets.io. Well, people have actually done that and came up with some other nice sounding acronyms. Here are some that I’ve seen: ANNE (AngularJS, Node.js, Neo4j, Express); BEANS (Bootstrap, Express, AngularJS, Node.js, Sockets.io); EARN (Express, AngularJS, Redis, Node.js). My point is that you’re not tied to MEAN, it’s simply a couple of technologies that work well together and can help you get things done.

If you like you can have a look at Sails.js, which is built on Express, but adds MVC and an ORM, among other things. Another alternative for Express (or Sails.js) is Hapi.js, which focuses more on configuration than code.

As alternative for MongoDB we’ve already seen Neo4j (a NoSQL graph database) and Redis (a NoSQL key-value store). They don’t actually have to be alternatives as you can use both in a single project. An actual alternative could be CouchDB, which is also a NoSQL document database and is probably the second most popular document database after MongoDB,
But who said you have to stick to NoSQL? If you’d like to use MySQL with Node.js that’s perfectly fine too!
If you just look at the Express database capabilities you’ll find databases such as Cassandra, PostgreSQL and ElasticSearch are supported out of the box.
And there are drivers for SQL Server and Oracle too.

Let’s look at some AngularJS alternatives. Of course there’s always jQuery that you can still use in your projects. Get some Knockout.js in your project too and you might not need AngularJS at all (although AngularJS is probably your first choice for SPAs (Single Page Applications).
While AngularJS is the most popular front end framework, it’s not your only choice. Underscore.js is another popular framework that is a little less bloated than AngularJS (but does less as well).
Another framework that you might want to try is Ember.js, which does pretty much everything that AngularJS does too. If you want to read more about Ember.js I can recommend Erik Hanchett’s blog.

And if you wish for another HTML template engine (or no template engine at all) you can ignore Jade and go with, for example, Mustache or Handlebars. Keep in mind you can use templating both on your back end and in your front end.

I’d mention alternatives for Node.js, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of MEAN and the (almost) all JavaScript stack. So let’s not do that (besides, you probably know them already).

Other popular modules

Let’s quickly check out some other popular Node.js modules. I’ll let you figure out how to use them on your own, but I’ll give a quick overview and a link to the website (with documentation).

The first library you might want to check is Browserify, which let’s you use require() in the browser. That’s pretty sweet!

Another popular library that you can use in both Node.js and in your front end is async. It provides many functions for asynchronous execution, such as each, map and filter on arrays.
It can also help you with asynchronous flow control. That is executing one task after another in an elegant and asynchronous manner. And for this same purpose the creator of async also gives us Nimble. And you might want to take a look at the alternatives Seq and Step as well.

So how about your minification, compilation, unit testing, linting (checking for syntax errors) etc.? For these tasks you can use Gulp or Grunt. Both applications are popular ‘task runners’ and can be easily installed using npm (using -g) and automate these kinds of tasks. They might take some configuration and some time to get used to, but they’re worth it.

Last I’d like to point out commander. Since everything nowadays seems to be working with the command prompt you might want to make your application command prompt configurable too. Something like “node server.js -super” where -super (or -s for short) starts your application in superman mode. You don’t need a library for this, but it does come in handy. Commander seems to be the most popular one.

So that’s it for the entire MEAN series. I hope you’ve learned and enjoyed it as much as I have! This is the end of the MEAN series, but certainly not the end of my blogging career. In the future you may expect more posts on web development, JavaScript, NoSQL, and who knows what. I’m always open for suggestions!

For additional reading on MEAN and related technologies I can once again recommend the Succinctly series by Syncfusion. They have many free ebooks like Node.js Succinctly, AngularJS Succinctly and MongoDB Succinctly. I’m also a big fan of the books by Manning Publications. Though not free they’re definitely worth your money. Books like Node.js In Action (second edition coming up), AngularJS In Action, MongoDB In Action (also a second edition coming up) and even Express In Action. A book on the entire MEAN stack, Getting MEAN, is also in the writing (so get it early)!

I’ll be on a vacation in Poland for the next two weeks, so don’t expect a new blog post for at least another three weeks. Maybe a short one on a rainy day and if I have wi-fi in the hotel, but I’m not making any promises.

Thanks for sticking with me and happy coding!

MEAN web development #8: Sockets will rock your socks!

This week I’m planning to keep it short. We’ll look at sockets and how to utilize them using Node.js. Luckily this is a relatively easy task for which Node.js is famous. Sockets enable you to build real time websites, something that is difficult at best using HTTP.
This will also be the last article in the series in which we’ll look at a new technology. If you read everything up til now you’re pretty well on your way to becoming a MEAN web developer! Next week we’ll have a wrap up and after that, who knows 🙂

  1. MEAN web development #1: MEAN, the what and why
  2. MEAN web development #2: Node.js in the back
  3. MEAN web development #3: More Node.js
  4. MEAN web development #4: All aboard the Node.js Express!
  5. MEAN web development #5: Jade and Express
  6. MEAN web development #6: AngularJS in the front
  7. MEAN web development #7: MongoDB and Mongoose
  8. MEAN web development #8: Sockets will rock your socks!
  9. MEAN web development #9: Some last remarks

As usual you can find the code samples for this post on my GitHub page under the mean8-blog repository.

What are sockets?

I won’t really go into technical details about sockets, or networks sockets. What is important to know is that a socket is basically an endpoint connection that allows communication between computers in a network. In an earlier post, Web development #1: Internet and the World Wide Web, I have briefly discussed the internet protocols TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) and I have mentioned other protocols such as UDP (User Datagram Protocol). Those protocols make use of sockets to transfer data across the web.

As we have seen protocols such as HTTP (and HTTPS) make use of the TCP/IP protocol, which makes use of sockets. As we know HTTP is a one way street, although the data flow isn’t. Think about it, with HTTP we can request data, but that data also has to be sent back to the client. What HTTP can’t do, but sockets obviously can, is sent data to a client. Now what if a server could send data to a client even though the client didn’t request it (at that exact moment)? Look no further! And that is exactly why sockets programming is becoming more and more popular!

The protocol used for this bi-directional exchange of data is called WebSockets and was standardized in 2011. As this is still pretty new keep in mind that older web browsers do not support this protocol. One thing to keep in mind is that WebSockets is really an upgrade from HTTP. A socket connection is actually established using an HTTP request.

Node.js has made it pretty easy to work with sockets. There are actually already quite a lot of tutorials out there and most of them let you build a chat application. Of course you can build anything requiring real time data. Think of real time Facebook or Twitter updates. It’s especially interesting when you consider the recent Internet of Things (or IoT) where everything is connected to the web. Let’s say someone rings your doorbell, which is connected to the web and sends you a picture of your front porch when someone rings the bell. Would you want to use HTTP to constantly poll/request if someone has just rang your doorbell? No you wouldn’t! In these scenario’s sockets are a necessity!

Sockets and Node.js

So let’s set up a small Node.js server that supports sockets. We could use ‘pure’ WebSockets for this, but I’m going to use a library for this called socket.io. This will make our life a lot easier on both the back- and front-end. socket.io is a layer around WebSockets that simplifies the API and, more importantly, falls back on other methods if WebSockets isn’t supported.

We’ll start by creating a Node.js server that serves some HTML page. We’ve done that a few times before, so that should be no problem. Remember that WebSockets requires HTTP to work, so we’ll need the HTTP module as well. And, as always, I’ll be using Express as well.

var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var http = require('http').Server(app);

app.use(express.static('public'));

app.get(['/', '/index'], function (req, res) {
    res.sendFile(__dirname + '/public/client.html');
});

http.listen(80, '127.0.0.1');

After that we can install socket.io (npm install socket.io).

var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var http = require('http').Server(app);
var io = require('socket.io')(http);

app.use(express.static('public'));

app.get(['/', '/index'], function (req, res) {
    res.sendFile(__dirname + '/public/client.html');
});

io.on('connection', function(socket){
    console.log('A user connected!');
});

http.listen(80, '127.0.0.1');

As you can see the http object is used to create an instance of socket.io. After that we can listen to the connection event for incoming sockets.

Now socket.io does a little magic trick, it automatically serves socket.io to our front-end. That means creating a socket instance on the client is really easy. First of all we need to include the script somewhere.

<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>Sockets example</title>
        <script src="/socket.io/socket.io.js"></script>
        <script src="client.js"></script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Sockets example</h1>
    </body>
</html>

And then we can use sockets in client.js.

var socket = io();

Wow, that was easy!

And you’ll notice that if you put that in /public/client.html and browse to localhost Node.js will log ‘A user connected!’ to the console! So we’re already connecting.

Now we’ve talked about EventEmitters before in MEAN web development #3: More Node.js. socket.io uses them extensively. Each socket has a special ”disconnect” event.

io.on('connection', function(socket){
    console.log('A user connected!');
    socket.on('disconnect', function () {
        console.log('A user disconnected...');
    });
});

If you try that, browse to localhost, and refresh the page, you’ll see “A user connectioned!”, “A user disconnected…” and “A user connected!” in the console. So this already works pretty sweet, right?

Let’s add another event. You know I like music and albums are always a favorite test object for me.

io.on('connection', function(socket){
    console.log('A user connected!');
    socket.on('disconnect', function () {
        console.log('A user disconnected...');
    });
    socket.on('add-album', function (album) {
        console.log(album);
    });
});

“Wait a minute!”, I hear you say, “No way a socket has an add-album event!” Well, not yet… Let’s check back in our front-end JavaScript again.

var socket = io();
socket.emit('add-album', {
    artist: 'Led Zeppelin',
    title: 'Led Zeppelin III'
});

Save it, browse to localhost again and surely will the console print the album. That’s pretty sweet!

But we’ll need more. After all, we want to receive data on our client! Of course we aren’t going to see any data unless we show it on our page.

Let’s first check out the server. This is really very easy. Ready?

io.emit('add-album', album);

Nice, we can simply use io.emit and all connections will get an update. So our client sends out an ‘add-album’ event to the server and the server sends an ‘add-album’ event back to the client. We could’ve used any name as event.

Let’s check the front-end. I’ve added in some AngularJS, which I’ve talked about before in MEAN web development #6: AngularJS in the front. Actually I’ve copied this example from that post and changed ‘book’ to ‘album’.

<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>Sockets example</title>
        <script src="angular.min.js"></script>
        <script src="/socket.io/socket.io.js"></script>
        <script src="client.js"></script>
    </head>
        <body ng-app="socketsApp">
        <div ng-controller="socketsController">
 
            <h1>Sockets example</h1>
            <ul>
                <li ng-repeat="album in albums">
 {{ album.artist + ' - ' + album.title }}
                </li>
            </ul>
 
            <input type="text" ng-model="newArtist" />
            <input type="text" ng-model="newTitle" />
            <button ng-click="addAlbum()">Add album</button>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

And here’s the JavaScript.

angular.module('socketsApp', [])
    .controller('socketsController', function ($scope) {
        
        var socket = io();
        
        $scope.newArtist = null;
        $scope.newTitle = null;
        $scope.albums = [];
        $scope.addAlbum = function () {
            socket.emit('add-album', {
                artist: $scope.newArtist,
                title: $scope.newTitle
            });
            $scope.newArtist = null;
            $scope.newTitle = null;
        };
        
        socket.on('add-album', function (album) {
            $scope.$apply(function () {
                $scope.albums.push(album);
            });
        });
    });

Notice the $apply function of AngularJS. It’s a detail, but I need it to execute the code in the AngularJS context so that the view gets updated immediately.
What really matters is the socket.on function. I don’t have to explain it, you know how it works. It’s the exact same code you use on the server!

Now open up two tabs, two browsers, two windows, two whatever, and browse to localhost. Enter an artist and title in one window and submit. Now switch to the other window and you’ll see the album you’ve just added in the other window! No refresh, no nothing! If you’re really using two windows put them next to each other and see the effect live in real time.

Now maybe you’re thinking this is awesome, but there’s no need to send back the object to the client that just sent it to the server. For this you can use socket.broadcast.emit. This will send out a message to all sockets, except the one that’s broadcasting.

socket.broadcast.emit('add-album', album);

And the front-end would now look as follows.

$scope.addAlbum = function () {
    var album = {
        artist: $scope.newArtist,
        title: $scope.newTitle
    };
    socket.emit('add-album', album);
    $scope.albums.push(album);
    $scope.newArtist = null;
    $scope.newTitle = null;
};

Pretty sweet!

Rooms

Let’s say you’re building that chat app we were talking about earlier (basically what we created here too). Now maybe you want your web site to have multiple chat rooms. A room for C# discussion, a room for JavaScript discussion, or maybe people can create their own rooms about whatever (maybe cars, music, movies). And perhaps you want to implement a private chat as well (one on one, or only invited people). How can you do this?

I’ll leave the previous example for what it is and start a new one. From our page we want to be able to create a room, join a room, send a message and leave a room. So let’s check out the Node.js server side.

io.on('connection', function(socket){
    console.log('A user connected!');
    socket.on('disconnect', function () {
        console.log('A user disconnected...');
    });
    socket.on('add-room', function (room) {
        console.log('Added:');
        console.log(room);
        socket.join(room.name);
        socket.broadcast.emit('add-room', room);
    });
    socket.on('join-room', function (room) {
        console.log('Joined:');
        console.log(room);
        socket.join(room);
    });
    socket.on('send-message', function (message) {
        console.log('Send:');
        console.log(message);         socket.broadcast.to(message.roomName).emit('receive-message', message);
    });
    socket.on('leave-room', function (room) {
        console.log('Leave:');
        console.log(room);
        socket.leave(room);
    });
});

That’s quite a bit of code, but there’s not much new, really! When someone adds a room we just broadcast the room to all other clients so everyone can see the new room. Additionally we ‘join’ the room using socket.join. This creates a group of sockets that can be notified at once. When a user joins a room we simply pass in a room name and again call socket.join. Then when someone sends a message to a room we simply call socket.broadcast.to(roomName) and now only clients that have joined that specific group will get a notification. That’s pretty easy, right? When we leave a room we simply call socket.leave and the client will stop receiving notifications from that specific room.

The client-side scripting for this example isn’t really interesting. You can get the complete example from GitHub. And yes, I admit, the HTML could use a little work. The JavaScript works the same as in the previous example. We simply use socket.emit, to send events to the server, and socket.on to receive events from the server. I’ll leave it as practice for the reader to add user names, persist chat rooms, get a list of active rooms, implement private rooms, etc.

If you want to do more with sockets and socket.io I can recommend reading Syncfusion’s Node.js Succinctly. It has a chapter on ‘vanilla’ sockets programming in Node.js (including an example on UDP) and a chapter on socket.io. If you’re still struggling with AngularJS I can recommend reading AngularJS Succinctly.
Additionally Manning has a great book on Node.js, Node.js in Action, which, of course, also covers sockets. A second edition of the book is also in the making!

Next week we’ll be wrapping up the MEAN web programming series! Happy coding!

MEAN web development #7: MongoDB and Mongoose

Last week we’ve seen some of the basic functionality of AngularJS, at least enough to get you started. Before that we’ve seen Node.js and Express. So that’s EAN and we’re left with the M. Well, Dial M for MongoDB because that’s what we’re going to look at this week.

  1. MEAN web development #1: MEAN, the what and why
  2. MEAN web development #2: Node.js in the back
  3. MEAN web development #3: More Node.js
  4. MEAN web development #4: All aboard the Node.js Express!
  5. MEAN web development #5: Jade and Express
  6. MEAN web development #6: AngularJS in the front
  7. MEAN web development #7: MongoDB and Mongoose
  8. MEAN web development #8: Sockets will rock your socks!
  9. MEAN web development #9: Some last remarks

As usual you can find the examples for this post on my GitHub page in the mean7-blog repository.

Hello persistent data

I’ve already written an entire post on NoSQL and MongoDB, A first look at NoSQL and MongoDB in particular. I’ve already told you to read it in the first part of this series, MEAN web development #1: MEAN, the what and why. If you haven’t read either of those I suggest you do so before continuing because I won’t repeat how to install MongoDB and MongoVUE. Don’t worry I’ll wait…

Before we continue I should mention that everything we’re going to do is async. That means lots of callback functions. We don’t want to block our main thread after all! It also means that the callbacks may not be called in the same order as their ‘parent functions’ are. Or that the records are actually inserted before we query them! Because I wanted to keep it simple in the complete example file I haven’t nested all examples in callbacks, but keep in mind that you may get some odd results. It worked fine for me by the way, if you get some weird results try running the examples one by one (simply commenting out the others).

So let’s just get a Node.js server up and running and write some data to the database real quick! You’ll be surprised how easy it is. First of all install the MongoDB driver using npm (npm install mongodb).
Next we’ll make a connection to our MongoDB instance.

var app = require('express')();
var MongoClient = require('mongodb').MongoClient;
     
var urlWithCreds = 'mongodb://user:password@localhost:27017/local';
var url = 'mongodb://localhost:27017/local';
MongoClient.connect(url, function (err, db) {
    if (err) {
        console.log(err);
    } else {
        console.log('Connected to the database.');
        db.close();
    }
});
var server = app.listen(80, '127.0.0.1');

So first of all we require Express (which isn’t necessary for MongoDB) and MongoDB. We take the MongoClient property of the MongoDB module. We use this client to connect to the database using the connect function, which takes a URI and a callback function. The callback has a MongoError (in case you can’t log in, for example if you have wrong credentials) and a Db as parameters.
We can use the Db object to do all kinds of stuff like creating and dropping databases, collections and indices and do our CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete). Let’s insert a simple object.

var url = 'mongodb://localhost:27017/local';
MongoClient.connect(url, function (err, db) {
    if (err) {
        console.log(err);
    } else {
        var artist = {
            name: 'Massive Attack',
            countryCode: 'GB'
        };
        var collection = db.collection('artists');
        collection.insertOne(artist);
        console.log(artist._id);
        db.close();
    }
});

As you can see we use the db parameter to get a collection (the MongoDB variant of a database table) using the collection function. If the collection does not exist it will create one automatically. We can then simply insert an object using the insertOne function of the collection. Now something funny has happened. After calling insertOne our artist object suddenly has an _id property. MongoDB uses this _id to uniquely identify objects.
So that wasn’t so bad right? Let’s look at other CRUD functionality!

CRUD with MongoDB

So let’s retrieve the record we just inserted. We can do this using the findOne function of the collection.

MongoClient.connect(url, function (err, db) {
    if (err) {
        console.log(err);
    } else {
        var collection = db.collection('artists');
        collection.findOne({ name: 'Massive Attack' }, function (err, artist) {
            if (err) {
                console.log(err);
            } else {
                console.log(artist);
            }
            db.close();
        });
    }
});

So the object that is passed to the findOne function is actually a search parameter. In this case we’re looking for documents (or records) that have a name equal to ‘Massive Attack’. The second parameter is a callback function that gives us an error, if any occurred, and the document that was retrieved. If you ran the previous example multiple times Massive Attack will be in your database more than once (having different values for _id), in this case findOne simply returns the first document it finds.

So let’s insert a few more artists, just so we’ve got a little set to work with. We can use the insertMany function for this.

collection.insertMany([
{
    name: 'The Beatles',
    countryCode: 'GB',
    members: [
        'John Lennon',
        'Paul McCartney',
        'George Harrison',
        'Ringo Starr'
    ]
},
{
    name: 'Justin Bieber',
    countryCode: 'No one wants him'
},
{
    name: 'Metallica',
    countryCode: 'USA'
},
{
    name: 'Lady Gaga',
    countryCode: 'USA'
}
], function (err, result) {
    if (err) {
        console.log(err);
    } else {
        console.log(result);
    }
});

Now you may think there’s a findMany function as well, but it’s actually just called find. find returns a Cursor which is something like an array, but not quite. We can use the toArray method though. The find function has a query parameter which is just an object that describes what fields of a document must have which values. We can search fields with AND, OR, NOT, IN, greater than, lesser than, regular expressions and everything you’re used to in SQL databases.

var findCallback = function (err, artists) {
    if (err) {
        console.log(err);
    } else {
        console.log('\n\nFound artists:');
        artists.forEach(function (a) {
            console.log(a);
        });
    }
};

// All documents.
collection.find().toArray(findCallback);

// Name not equal to Justin Bieber.
collection.find({ name: { $ne: 'Justin Bieber' } }).toArray(findCallback);

// Name equal to Massive Attach or name equal to The Beatles.
collection.find({ $or: [{ name: 'Massive Attack' }, { name: 'The Beatles' }] }).toArray(findCallback);

// Members contains John Lennon.
collection.find({ members: 'John Lennon' }).toArray(findCallback);

Now let’s update a record.

collection.findOneAndUpdate({ name: 'Massive Attack' },
    { $set: {
        cds: [
            {
                title: 'Collected',
                year: 2006,
                label: {
                    name: 'Virgin'
                },
                comment: 'Best Of'
            },
            {
                title: 'Mezzanine',
                year: 1998,
                label: 'Virgin'
            },
            {
                title: 'No Protection: Massive Attack v Mad Professor',
                year: 1995,
                label: 'Circa Records',
                comment: 'Remixes'
            },
            {
                title: 'Protection',
                year: 1994,
                label: {
                    name: 'Circa'
                }
            }
        ]
        }
    }, function (err, result) {
    console.log('\n\nUpdated artist:');
    if (err) {
        console.log(err);
    } else {
        console.log(result);
    }
});

Here we see the findOneAndUpdate in action. Alternatively we could’ve used updateOne. And for multiple updates we can use updateMany.

Now let’s delete a record. There’s one guy I really don’t want in my database (yes, I’ve added him so I wouldn’t feel guilty about deleting him).  And for this we can, of course, use findOneAndDelete.

collection.findOneAndDelete({ name: 'Justin Bieber' }, function (err, result) {
    console.log('\n\nDeleted artist:');
    if (err) {
        console.log(err);
    } else {
        console.log(result);
    }
});

Really no surprises there. Alternatively there’s deleteOne and to delete many use, you guessed it, deleteMany.

Mongoose

So MongoDB with Node.js looks really good, right? It wasn’t very hard to use. It’s really just a matter of working with JavaScript objects. And as we all know JavaScript objects are very dynamic. In the previous examples we’ve already seen that some artists have a member property defined and then when we updated we all of a sudden had a cds property and some CD’s have a comment while others don’t… And MongoDB has no problem with it at all. We just save and fetch what is there.

Now try this.

var app = require('express')();
var MongoClient = require('mongodb').MongoClient;

var Artist = function (name, activeFrom, activeTo) {
    if (!(this instanceof Artist)) {
       return new Artist(name, activeFrom, activeTo);
    }
    var self = this;
    self.name = name;
    self.activeFrom = activeFrom;
    self.activeTo = activeTo;
    self.yearsActive = function () {
        if (self.activeTo) {
            return self.activeTo - self.activeFrom;
        } else {
            return new Date().getFullYear() - self.activeFrom;
        }
    };
};

var url = 'mongodb://localhost:27017/local';
MongoClient.connect(url, function (err, db) {
    if (err) {
        console.log(err);
    } else {
        var collection = db.collection('artists');
        // Empty the collection
        // so the next examples can be run more than once.
        collection.deleteMany();
        
        var massiveAttack = new Artist('Massive Attack', 1988);
        console.log('\n\n' + massiveAttack.name + ' has been active for ' + massiveAttack.yearsActive() +  ' years.');
        
        collection.insertOne(massiveAttack);
        
        collection.findOne({ name: massiveAttack.name }, function (err, result) {
            if (err) {
                console.log(err);
            } else {
                try {
                    console.log('\n\n' + result.name + ' has been active for ' + result.yearsActive() +  ' years.');
                } catch (ex) {
                    console.log(ex);
                }
            }
        });
        
    }
});

var server = app.listen(80, '127.0.0.1');

What happens is that MongoDB doesn’t store the yearsActive function nor the constructor function. What MongoDB stores are just the non-function values. The result is that when we retrieve our object it will no longer be an Artist object, but just an object that just so happens to have the same properties as an Artist.

This is where Mongoose comes to the rescue! Mongoose adds a schema to your MongoDB objects. Let’s see how that works.

To add Mongoose to your project you can install it using npm install mongoose.

So first we can use mongoose.connect to get a connection to the database.

var app = require('express')();
var mongoose = require('mongoose');

var url = 'mongodb://localhost:27017/local';
mongoose.connect(url);
var db = mongoose.connection;
db.on('error', function (err) {
    console.log(err);
});
db.once('open', function (callback) {
    // ...
});

var server = app.listen(80, '127.0.0.1');

After that we can define a schema using the Schema function.

db.once('open', function (callback) {
    var artistSchema = mongoose.Schema({
        name: String,
        activeFrom: Number,
        activeTo: Number
    });
    artistSchema.methods.yearsActive = function () {
        var self = this;
        if (self.activeTo) {
            return self.activeTo - self.activeFrom;
        } else {
            return new Date().getFullYear() - self.activeFrom;
        }
    };
});

And as you can see I’ve appended the yearsActive function to the artistSchema.methods object. After that we can create a Model using mongoose.model.

var Artist = mongoose.model('Artist', artistSchema);

And after that the Artist variable (a Model) is actually the portal to your collection. It’s also a constructor function for artists. So let’s create our Massive Attack artist.

var massiveAttack = new Artist({ name: 'Massive Attack', activeFrom: 1988 });
console.log('\n\n' + massiveAttack.name + ' has been active for ' + massiveAttack.yearsActive() + ' years.');

And then we can save it using the save function.

massiveAttack.save(function (err, result) {
    if (err) {
        console.log(err);
    } else {
        // ...
    }
});

And now that the artist is saved let’s retrieve it and call that yearsActive function again. We can simply retrieve our object using Model.findOne.

Artist.findOne({ name: massiveAttack.name }, function (err, result) {
    if (err) {
        console.log(err);
    } else {
        try {
            console.log('\n\n' + result.name + ' has been active for ' + result.yearsActive() +  ' years.');
        } catch (ex) {
            console.log(ex);
        }
    }
});

And here I’ve put the findOne directly in the callback function of save, which I didn’t do before. I needed this because calling findOne directly after save didn’t yield any results (timing issue I guess). More importantly it did successfully execute the yearsActive function!

And like with the regular MongoDB driver we can use find, remove, findOneAndRemove and findOneAndUpdate.

So we’ve looked at the MongoDB driver and at the problem of schemaless objects which Mongoose fixes. I can recommend practicing a bit, as it’s really very easy to drop, create, insert, update, read and remove data, and reading the API documentation of both. We’ve only scratched the surface here, but it got you on your way.

And of course I’m going to recommend some additional reading. The Node.js Succinctly book is just a great resource for Node.js in general and it has a tiny bit on MongoDB and SQLite as well. I can also recommend MongoDB Succinctly. And Getting MEAN from Manning even has a chapter on MongoDB and Mongoose.

Happy coding!

MEAN web development #6: AngularJS in the front

Hi all and welcome back! Welcome back to me too as I’ve been away for a while. Let’s just say I was enjoying a summer vacation from blogging. But I’m back to finish this MEAN series! This week I’ve got AngularJS for you. Maybe next week too.
And in case you need a refresher, here are my previous posts about MEAN:

  1. MEAN web development #1: MEAN, the what and why
  2. MEAN web development #2: Node.js in the back
  3. MEAN web development #3: More Node.js
  4. MEAN web development #4: All aboard the Node.js Express!
  5. MEAN web development #5: Jade and Express
  6. MEAN web development #6: AngularJS in the front
  7. MEAN web development #7: MongoDB and Mongoose
  8. MEAN web development #8: Sockets will rock your socks!
  9. MEAN web development #9: Some last remarks

So in the previous post we’ve seen how we can build pages using the Jade template engine. Pretty sweet, but we need something bigger, better and badder for our front-end.

You can find the examples for this blog on my GitHub page in the mean6-blog repository.

What is AngularJS?

You may have heard of AngularJS before. It’s one of the most popular open-source front-end JavaScript frameworks for the web developed by Google. And, of course, it’s the A in MEAN. But what does it do?

AngularJS is an MVVM framework, much like Knockout.js. It does a bit more than Knockout.js does though. Next to bindings AngularJS can be used for DOM manipulation, more like jQuery. And it does even more, like handling AJAX and routing. As Google likes to put it: AngularJS is “Superheroic” in that it does just about everything.

So instead of talking let’s see some action! First of all we need to install AngularJS. You can download it from the AngularJS website, or you can install it through a package manager such as npm or Bower (install angular). I’ve discussed all three methods in earlier posts so I will not repeat them here. Anyway, if you’ve downloaded my samples from GitHub you’ll be good to go.

The first examples of this post can be tested using nothing but the file system. For later examples with AJAX we’re going to need a little Node.js server, so I’ll add that later. The non-server examples can be found in the front-end.html and the front-end.js files.

So let’s take a look at a first example.

<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>AngularJS example</title>
        <script src="node_modules/angular/angular.min.js"></script>
    </head>
    <body ng-app>
        <p>This is your first angular expression: {{ 'This is AngularJS' + ' syntax!' }}</p>
    </body>
</html>

So there are two things going on here. First is the ng-app directive in the body element. This tells AngularJS that body is the root element of our application and that AngularJS should do its magic. You can place it anywhere you want (like in the html element, or maybe a div element somewhere) and a page can have multple ng-app directives (which I won’t be doing in this post).

Next is, of course, the weird {{ }} syntax, which is the syntax AngularJS uses for its bindings. In this case you’ll see that ‘This is AngularJS’ and ‘ syntax!’ are, indeed, appended in your browser, like it was just some JavaScript. Try using {{ 1 + 2 }} and you’ll see it will print ‘3’ since 1 + 2 equals 3 in JavaScript (and not ’12’).

Now let’s look at something really very cool. Suppose you want to bind some value to an input. Here’s how to do it.

<body ng-app>
    <p>Enter you name:
        <input type="text" ng-model="firstName" />
        <input type="text" ng-model="lastName" />
    </p>
    <p>You have entered: {{ firstName + ' ' + lastName }}</p>
</body>

No JavaScript required! Wow, that is so cool! And firstName and lastName are updated real time, while you’re typing! We bound our inputs using the ng-model directive which takes care of creating and binding the firstName and lastName properties.

Enter controllers

You’ll often want more control over your code and putting all of your JavaScript into your HTML is not a good idea. So we’ll want to use AngularJS with some custom JavaScript file that we wrote. This is where things get tricky. Not very tricky, but you just got to know how it works.

An AngularJS application is defined by modules. Modules then define controllers.

angular.module('fullNameApp', [])
    .controller('fullNameController', function ($scope) {
        $scope.firstName = '';
        $scope.lastName = '';
        $scope.fullName = function () {
            return $scope.firstName + ' ' + $scope.lastName;
        };
    });

So as we see here we create a module by calling the angular.module function and passing it more than one parameter. This returns an application so we can call the controller function directly on the return value. In the controller function we pass in the name of the controller, so we can use it in our HTML, and a constructor function, which receives a $scope variable to which we can append properties.

Now our HTML would look like this:

<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>AngularJS example</title>
        <script src="node_modules/angular/angular.min.js"></script>
        <script src="front-end.js"></script>
    </head>
    <body ng-app="fullNameApp">
        <div ng-controller="fullNameController">
            <p>Enter you name:
                <input type="text" ng-model="firstName" />
                <input type="text" ng-model="lastName" />
            </p>
            <p>You have entered: {{ fullName() }}</p>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

So as you can see we’ve now named our ng-app directive and we’ve added a div element with an ng-controller directive which points to our fullNameController controller. Finally, we now use the fullName function. Notice that we could now set default values in our controller and they’ll be displayed on our page automatically.

$scope.firstName = 'Sander';
$scope.lastName = 'Rossel';

More directives

So let’s take a look at some more directives that can help you build amazing pages. ng-repeat can be used to repeat an element for every item in a list. So let’s add a little array on our controller.

$scope.favoriteMovies = [
    'Star Wars',
    'Lord of the Rings',
    'Fight Club'
];

And display it in an unordered list.

<ul>
    <li ng-repeat="movie in favoriteMovies">
        {{ movie }}
    </li>
</ul>

Now we want to be able to add and delete items from the list. This next piece might blow your mind, but there’s a very simple directive to make a text input that can make a comma separated list and convert it to an array real time.

<input type="text" ng-model="favoriteMovies" ng-list />

So we bind the input to our favoriteMovies using ng-model and then use ng-list to convert it to a comma separated list. Try adding “, Pulp Fiction” (or whatever movie you like) to the text input and the movie will automatically be added to the unordered list we had before!
And if you want something else instead of a comma specifiy it in the ng-list, like so:

<input type="text" ng-model="favoriteMovies" ng-list=" | " />

And what if we add objects instead of strings?

$scope.favoriteAlbums = [
    { artist: 'The Beatles', title: "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" },
    { artist: 'Moby', title: 'Play' },
    { artist: 'The Prodigy', title: 'Fat Of The Land' }
];
<ul>
    <li ng-repeat="album in favoriteAlbums">
        {{ album.artist + ' - ' + album.title }}
    </li>
</ul>

So how about making that editable?

<div ng-repeat="album in favoriteAlbums">
    <input type="text" ng-model="album.artist" />
    <input type="text" ng-model="album.title" />
</div>
<button ng-click="favoriteAlbums.push({})">New album</button>

And that’s where we see the ng-click in action. Of course we could’ve called a function on our controller too.

$scope.addAlbum = function () {
    $scope.favoriteAlbums.push({});
};
<button ng-click="addAlbum()">New album</button>

There’s a little problem with ng-repeat that isn’t quite obvious from these examples. ng-repeat creates a separate scope for each object in an array. For objects this is no problem, but if you were binding to an array of primitives, such as integers or strings, the values wouldn’t be updated. So just remember to use objects when wanting to update array elements.

So how about adding a little styling to our page? With the ng-class directive we can add styles to elements based on some boolean value. The best part is you can add multiple classes based on one or more boolean values. So I have added a little embedded CSS to our page.

<style>
    .colored {
        color: red;
    }
 
    .underlined {
        text-decoration: underline;
    }
</style>

And two properties in the controller to specify whether we want some text to be colored and/or underlined.

$scope.addColor = true;
$scope.addUnderline = false;

Now in our HTML we can add two checkboxes for the two properties above and then add an ng-class directive on some element that adds the CSS classes based on the JavaScript properties.

Color: <input type="checkbox" ng-model="addColor" />
Underline: <input type="checkbox" ng-model="addUnderline" />
<p ng-class="{ colored: addColor, underlined: addUnderline }">This text might be colored and/or underlined!</p>

Pretty sweet, right? As you can see ng-class should simply evaluate to an object where each property is a class name with a value true or false to specify whether it should be applied.

But there’s an alternative. We could simply specify a string too. So consider the next JavaScript function which returns a string:

$scope.getClasses = function () {
    var classes = '';
    if ($scope.addColor) {
        classes += 'colored ';
    }
    if ($scope.addUnderline) {
        classes += 'underlined ';
    }
    return classes;
};

We can now use ng-class as follows:

<p ng-class="getClasses()">This text might be colored and/or underlined!</p>

Or you could return an array where each element is either an object such as in the first method or a string such as in the second method. I’ll leave that as practice for the reader though.

Also fun to mention, when you’re inside an ng-repeat directive you can use ng-class-even and ng-class-odd which work exactly as ng-class, but apply the styles only to even or odd elements.

Filters

AngularJS had a feature called filters. It can format values or actually filter lists.

Let’s go back to the first example. Let’s suppose you wanted to show full name in just uppercase or in just lowercase. This is an easy task!

<p>You have entered: {{ fullName() | uppercase }}</p>
<p>You have entered: {{ fullName() | lowercase }}</p>

We can also use a filter to format numbers and dates. It looks kind of the same, except this time you throw in a format.

<p>
    <input type="text" ng-model="number"><br>
    Number (default): {{ number | number }}<br>
    Number (no fractions): {{ number | number: 0 }}<br>
    Number (three fractions): {{ number | number: 2 }}
</p>
<p>
    Date (default): {{ date | date }}<br>
    Date (dd-MM-yyyy): {{ date | date: 'dd-MM-yyyy' }}<br>
    Date (yy/M/d): {{ date | date: 'yy/M/d' }}<br>
    Date (full): {{ date | date: 'fullDate' }}<br>
    Date (long): {{ date | date: 'longDate' }}
</p>

And for arrays you can do some awesome stuff too!  For this we use the orderBy or filter filter.

<h3>Ordered by title</h3>
<ul>
    <li ng-repeat="album in favoriteAlbums | orderBy: 'title'">
        {{ album.artist + ' - ' + album.title }}
    </li>
</ul>
<h3>Ordered by artist reverse</h3>
<ul>
    <li ng-repeat="album in favoriteAlbums | orderBy: 'artist' : true">
        {{ album.artist + ' - ' + album.title }}
    </li>
</ul>
<h3>Filtered on everything with '*y*'</h3>
<ul>
    <li ng-repeat="album in favoriteAlbums | filter: 'y'">
        {{ album.artist + ' - ' + album.title }}
    </li>
</ul>
<h3>Filtered on artist with '*y*'</h3>
<ul>
    <li ng-repeat="album in favoriteAlbums | filter: { artist: 'y' }">
        {{ album.artist + ' - ' + album.title }}
    </li>
</ul>

Keep in mind that we can get these values from our JavaScript controller as well. You can make the most awesome dynamic filters with very little trouble. Just make sure you pass in an object with the same properties as the objects you’re repeating and set their values to the values you’d like to filter.

AJAX with AngularJS

So as mentioned AngularJS does a lot more than just HTML binding. One feature we’re going to look at here is that of the $http service. Needless to say we’ll need a little back-end server to communicate with, so for the AJAX examples I’m going to create a Node.js server and some new HTML and JavaScript so we can serve them up using our Node.js server.

Here’s the server:

var express = require('express');
var bodyParser = require('body-parser');
var app = express();

var books = [
    { title: 'Lord of the Rings', author: 'J.R.R. Tolkien' },
    { title: 'Harry Potter', author: 'J.K. Rowling' },
    { title: "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", author: 'Douglas Adams' }
];

app.use(bodyParser.json());
app.use(express.static('public'));

app.get(['/', '/index'], function (req, res) {
    res.sendFile(__dirname + '/public/ajax-example.html');
});

app.get('/books', function (req, res) {
    res.send(books);
});

app.post('/addBook', function (req, res) {
    var book = req.body;
    books.push(book);
    res.send(books);
});

var server = app.listen(80, '127.0.0.1');

So there’s a lot going on there. First of all I’ve added some Express. I’m also requiring body-parser (npm install body-parser), which is needed to get our POST data. Then I call the app.use function a couple of times. We’ve seen it before. It simply adds a middleware to a path. In this case we tell it to parse any JSON body so we can use it in our app. We also tell it that we can serve static files from the public folder (so we can serve the HTML and JavaScript file).
After that we serve the page by browsing to the root or root/index. I’ve also specified a GET for root/books, which simply returns a list of books (as JSON). And, what it’s all about, a POST to add a book to the list of books.

Let’s look at our front-end JavaScript.

angular.module('ajaxApp', [])
    .controller('ajaxController', function ($scope, $http) {
        $scope.newAuthor = null;
        $scope.newTitle = null;
        $scope.books = [];
        $scope.getBooks = function () {
            $http.get('http://localhost/books')
            .then(function (response) {
                $scope.books = response.data;
            }, function (response) {
                alert('Something went wrong while getting the books!');
            });
        };
    $scope.addBook = function () {
        $http.post('http://localhost/addBook', { author: $scope.newAuthor, title: $scope.newTitle })
            .then(function (response) {
                $scope.newAuthor = null;
                $scope.newTitle = null;
                $scope.books = response.data;
            }, function (response) {
                alert('Something went wrong while adding a new book!');
            });
        };
    });

So that’s quite a thing too! First of all notice a $http parameter being passed to the controller constructor function. We’ll need this $http parameter to make HTTP calls. Now we first use this in the getBooks function. You’ll see that using this $http stuff is actually very simple! We use $http.get and pass it our URL to get the books. It returns a promise, which has a then function that takes two callbacks, a success function and a failure function. The functions are executed once the asynchronous call returns (AJAX is asynchronous, remember?). So if everything goes right we simply assign the data (a list of books) to the books property. If something goes wrong we show an alert.

In the addBook function I’m using the $http.post function. It’s really similar to the get example, except we’re now passing in some data, a new book. Upon success the book list, including the new book, is returned and we reset the newAuthor and newTitle (nice example of two-way binding by the way).

Now for the HTML:

<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>AngularJS AJAX example</title>
        <script src="angular.min.js"></script>
        <script src="ajax-example.js"></script>
    </head>
    <body ng-app="ajaxApp">
        <div ng-controller="ajaxController">
 
            <h2>AJAX example</h2>
            <button ng-click="getBooks()">Get books</button>
            <ul>
                <li ng-repeat="book in books">
                    {{ book.author + ' - ' + book.title }}
                </li>
            </ul>
 
            <input type="text" ng-model="newAuthor" />
            <input type="text" ng-model="newTitle" />
            <button ng-click="addBook()">Add book</button>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

And there you have it!

So AngularJS can do two-way binding, supports MVVM and MVC architecture, it can do AJAX, but also routing, internationalization and localization, you can write custom directives and customize all you like, it supports testing and it has lots of directives I haven’t discussed like ng-show, ng-hide, ng-form, ng-blur… I guess Google wasn’t exaggerating when they called AngularJS ‘superheroic’ because it really seems to have some super powers!

And of course I’ll be leaving you with some recommended reading. As you know I’m a big fan of the (free) Succinctly series by Syncfusion, so here’s two must reads: AngularJS Succinctly and Node.js Succinctly. Also check out these awesome books by Manning Publications: AngularJS In Action, AngularJS In Depth, Node.js In Action (Second Edition) and Getting MEAN. And a book I’ve recently picked up at work: Pro AngularJS.
Well, that should keep you busy for a few months!

Happy coding!

MEAN web development #5: Jade and Express

In the last few weeks it was my time to shine… In absence. Been quite busy with, you know, stuff. But here I am ready to give you a new installment of the MEAN web development series! If you haven’t read my previous posts, or if you’ve forgotten all about them in my absence, you can find them here:

  1. MEAN web development #1: MEAN, the what and why
  2. MEAN web development #2: Node.js in the back
  3. MEAN web development #3: More Node.js
  4. MEAN web development #4: All aboard the Node.js Express!
  5. MEAN web development #5: Jade and Express
  6. MEAN web development #6: AngularJS in the front
  7. MEAN web development #7: MongoDB and Mongoose
  8. MEAN web development #8: Sockets will rock your socks!
  9. MEAN web development #9: Some last remarks

So in my previous blog from a few weeks back I’ve talked about using Express in Node.js. One thing I haven’t discussed yet is the templating option of Express. As that is actually quite simple this blog will be more about the template engine Jade than about Express. Of course we’ll use both to build a few pages.

You can find the examples for this blog on my GitHub page in the mean5-blog repository.

Starting out with Jade

So you can probably guess our first step (assuming you’ve already installed Node.js)… If it included npm somehow you are correct. We need to install Jade using npm. We’ll also want Express, of course, you know how it goes! You can read about npm and how to use it in my first MEAN article, MEAN web development #1: MEAN, the what and why. So create a folder for your project somewhere, optionally create a package.json file (containing at least an opening and closing bracket), open up a command prompt and use the following commands.

cd C:\project-folder
npm install express --save
npm install jade --save

The –save is optional and only makes sense when you created a package.json file.

Finally create your server.js file where your actual JavaScript goes. So now you have everything you need to start using Node.js, Express and Jade.

Let’s not do that yet though. Let’s take a step back. What exactly is Jade and why would you want to use it? Jade is a template engine, which means you can write some pseudo-HTML which the Jade engine can transform into actual HTML. One reason to use Jade is because it saves typing, “h1 Examples” will output “<h1>Example</h1>” for example. So that saves like seven characters, but it adds up.

Less typing is the least good reason to start using Jade though. When using Jade it is possible to pass some JavaScript object to your Jade code and build your page differently depending on your JavaScript. For example you might have an array and you want to iterate over the array to show a table on your page. Or maybe you just want to show the name of the logged in user in the top right corner.
Jade also supports and encourages a more object oriented style of writing your HTML. That’s awesome because you can now write a piece of HTML Jade once and use it everywhere.

Sounds good, right? But isn’t all of this already possible using PHP, Java or C#? Yeah, sure. And you can even do this in Node.js. Simply create a string containing your HTML, do some string concatenation, replaces, etc. No problem at all.
So why would you still want to use Jade? Because Jade makes it easy! All the string concatenation and replaces you’d have to do in PHP or “vanilla” Node.js is done for you. What’s left is a file that’s easier to read than the HTML it ultimately produces! And the good thing about Jade is that it has Node.js and Express support out-of-the-box!

Hello Jade!

I think that title says it all, no? We won’t be using Node.js and Express just yet though. In fact I want you to fire up a command prompt and install Jade again, this time globally so we can use it from the command prompt.

npm install jade -g

Now create a folder in the Node.js project we just created and call it jade-examples. We’re going to use this folder and some of the examples later with Node.js and Express. So in that folder create a file and call it hello-jade.jade. If you got my sources from GitHub you can find the file in jade-examples. Put the following code in the file.

html
  head
    title Hello, Jade!
  body
    h1 Hello, Jade!
    p This is awesome!

So that’s maybe a bit much for a simple Hello World example, but I’m pretty sure you can figure out what HTML this will generate. One thing I’d like to point out is that Jade is whitespace sensitive. More specifically, you must use whitespaces to nest elements. That means that you got to be really careful with your spaces, they’re not just makeup!

I recently spent an evening debugging some Haskell code (which is also whitespace sensitive) because I had used spaces on one line and a tab on another. Try figuring that out, it all looks the same!
I recommend using spaces by the way, if your editor supports it look for the option that converts tabs to spaces and you’ll be safe.

Enter the CMD

So how to get some HTML out of this? With the command prompt, of course. So browse to the folder where you’ve put your file and use the following command.

cd file-folder
jade hello-jade.jade

Now check it out, it generated a hello-jade.html file. It’s not very readable though. Everything is put on a single line! Let’s fix that. You can use some options in the command prompt. We’re going to use -P (that’s a capital P).

jade hello-jade.jade -P

Looks a look better, doesn’t it?

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Hello, Jade!</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello, Jade!</h1>
    <p>This is awesome!</p>
  </body>
</html>

For multiline text you should use one of the following methods. Use a dot after your element or use pipes | on every single line.

p.
  This is one line.
  This is a second.
p
  |This is one line.
  |This is a second.
p
  This won't work.
  It just won't.

The HTML that is generated looks as follows.

<p>
  This is one line.
  This is a second.
</p>
<p>
  This is one line.
  This is a second.
</p>
<p>
  <This>won't work.</This>
  <It>just won't.</It>
</p>

As you can see Jade will happily generate syntactically correct, yet invalid HTML! Keep in mind that HTML isn’t whitespace sensitive so the above HTML will still render the two lines of text on a single line in your browser. If you need a seperate line you’ll have to insert a <br> element.

Doing more with Jade

So now that we’ve got that out of the way let’s look at some other features of Jade. Of course you can add attributes to your elements.

h1(id="header") Attributes
p(class="text") This is an example using attributes.
p Here's a text input.
input(type="text")

I won’t show you the HTML output as you can generate it yourself or look at the files from my GitHub.

Here’s some other stuff we can do with Jade.

// This comment will be visible in our HTML.
//- This one won't (it's the hyphen!)
//- Ids are so common we have a shorthand!
h1#header Attributes
//- Same goes for classes.
p.text This is an example using attributes.
p.text.second-class.third-class Here's a text input.
input(type="text")
//
  Block comment
  With lots of space
  And lines

p Some text with another <strong>element</strong>.

//-
  Yes, this is possible,
  but we need to put it on a new line
  and prefix it with a pipe.
| Some text without enclosing tags.

Using JavaScript

So that’s all pretty cool, but you probably want more. You’re in luck, because there’s much more! In fact, you can use JavaScript to generate HTML. That means you can have any JavaScript object and use it just like that.

For the next example we’re going to need two files. First is our Jade file. I’ve called it javascript.jade.

h1= title
p= text

The = sign means some code will follow. So “title” and “text” is actually code. More precise they’re properties/variables. Using = will also filter your JavaScript to prevent injection attacks. If you like to disable this feature simply use != instead.

You could generate HTML from the above Jade file, but since title and text are not set you’ll just get an empty header and paragraph. So we’ll need to pass in something to the engine so it knows how to interpret those values. We can do that using a JSON file. So create another file, I’ve called it javascript.json, and put in the following JSON.

{
  "title": "Jade and JavaScript!",
  "text": "You can just insert JavaScript Objects into your templates!"
}

Now we can use the command prompt to generate the HTML using the JSON file. Notice that we’ll use a capital O in the next sample.

jade -O javascript.json javascript.jade

This will generate the HTML and it will have replaced title and text with the values from your JSON file. Awesome!

In the next example I’ve included all JavaScript into the Jade file so we don’t need a seperate JSON file. Try setting the showHeader variable to false and generate the HTML again. Also notice the difference between the escaped and the unescaped code.

//-
  The following code
  will not be shown
  in your HTML.
  We'll use - instead of =

-
  var showHeader = true;
  var header = 'Jade is awesome!'

//- Single line code.
- if (showHeader)
  h1= header

//- Native Jade syntax!
if showHeader
  h1= header

//- Multiline code.
-
  var movies = [];
  movies.push('Star Wars');
  movies.push('Lord of the Rings');
  movies.push('Harry Potter');

ol
  each movie in movies
    li= movie

- var code = 'HTML may look like this: <p>Hello, Jade!</p>';
//- Some escaped code.
p= code
//- Some unescaped code.
p!= code

Inheritance

So how about we look into that inheritance now? Most, if not all, websites have a standard structure that’s the same across the entire page. We have a header at the top, footer at the bottom, a menu on the left, top or right and the content in the middle. And it’s usually the middle part that changes while the rest stays more or less the same. So let’s define that basic layout. I’m going to keep it simple so I’ll just have a page with a fixed footer. For simplicity I’m just going to use embedded CSS in our Jade template. I’ve called the following file base.jade.

html
  head
    style(type="text/css").
      html {
        position: relative;
        min-height: 100%;
      }

      body {
        margin: 0 0 100px;
      }
 
      footer {
        background-color: #41a62a;
        position: absolute;
        left: 0;
        bottom: 0;
        height: 100px;
        width: 100%;
      }
    block head
  body
    div#content
      p This is the content!
      block content
    footer
      p This is the footer!
      block footer

This looks a lot like what we already know. The only weird thing here are those blocks. The block elements aren’t visible in the generated HTML, so it’s completely possible to use a ‘base’ page as a regular page on your site.

Overrides

Now those blocks can be overridden by inheritors. So block content can be replaced with anything you like. Let’s see what that looks like. I’ve created an base-inheritor.jade file which extends base.jade.

extends base.jade

block head
  title Inheritor

block content
  p This is the inheritor page!

block footer
  a(href="#") Some link

The file starts with extending base.jade (that’s actually the relative path to the file, since I have it in the same folder it’s just the file name). After that I’m filling in the content for each block. It’s totally optional to override a block.
Now you can simply generate the HTML for base-inheritor.jade and you’ll see the entire base is generated too!

There’s a little more you can do with those blocks though. Here’s a simple file called blocks.jade.

block header
 h1 Inheritance using Jade!

block content
 p Here is some content.

block footer
 p This is the footer.

As you can see I’ve put some content in each of those blocks. In an inheritor we can replace that content, append to that content or prepend to that content. This is illustrated in blocks-inheritor.jade.

extends blocks.jade

block header
  h1 Another header!

prepend content
  p This is even more content!

append footer
  a(href="#") Some link

You may use “block append” or “block prepend”, but the block keyword is optional. Now generate the HTML and check out the results!

It’s also possible to put blocks in blocks, but I’ll leave that as practice for the reader.

Mixins

Now there is one last feature I’d like to show you, which is mixins. A mixin is a bit like a function, a reusable piece of Jade! Let’s just look at some examples.

//- Here is a mixin.
mixin lorem
  h2 First paragraph of Lorem Ipsum...
  p Lorem ipsum [...]

h1 Mixins
//- Mixin usage is a big plus!
+lorem
+lorem
+lorem

h2 Animals
- var animals = ['Cat', 'Dog', 'Goldfish'];

//- A mixin with a parameter and JavaScript!
mixin isKnownAnimal(animal)
  if animals.indexOf(animal) >= 0
    p= 'The ' + animal + ' is a known animal.'
  else
    p= 'The ' + animal + ' is not a known animal!'

+isKnownAnimal('Cat')
+isKnownAnimal('Dog')
+isKnownAnimal('Parrot')

Pretty awesome, right?

Express

So that’s all the Jade I’ve got for you! You can now create Jade pages and generate HTML through the command prompt. We’d use it within Node.js though! So the time has come to get back to the project we created at the start of this post.

In the server.js you need to do two things. Tell Express where to find its templates and what engine to use when rendering those templates. Then on a request render any template you like.
It’s that easy!

Now we’ve got all these Jade examples we can generate using Express! I picked a few interesting ones. Here’s the code for the entire server.js.

var express = require('express');
var app = express();

app.set('views', './jade-examples')
app.set('view engine', 'jade');

// Use hello-jade as index.
app.get('/', function (req, res) {
    res.render('hello-jade');
});

app.get('/javascript', function (req, res) {
    res.render('javascript', {
        title: 'Jade and JavaScript!',
        text: 'You can just insert JavaScript Objects into your templates!'
    });
});

app.get('/base-inheritor', function (req, res) {
    res.render('base-inheritor');
});

app.get('/mixins', function (req, res) {
    res.render('mixins');
});

var server = app.listen(80, '127.0.0.1');

Is that all? That’s all!

Wrap up

So I usually give you some reading recommendations at the end of a blog, but I really haven’t got anything for Jade. You can get a lot from the language reference on the Jade website, although it’s hardly a good place to start.
Of course you can always check out some books by Manning, like Express.js in Action, which has a chapter on templating in Express and Jade. And keep an eye out for the ebooks by Syncfusion. Node.js Succinctly has a chapter on Express and JavaScript Succinctly is always handy when working with JavaScript.

Hope to see you again next week.
Stay tuned!