RobertBaron / dev-cards

Learn coding by flashing cards!

dev-cards.io — Learn coding by having fun!

In order to mastering a tool, you need to go through the documentation.

And here is where we fit, when you open a documentation page is full of distractions, and if you are a human you probably get bored in the first few methods.

Also we know that doing quizzes or a lot of questions is more than boring, you probably will be able to do it for a couple of days, but in the long term it won't work!

Our goal is to make API's easy to learn by having the documentation in cards, kind of a game, one card at least per day, so users don't have to dedicate more than 30 seconds a day, easy right?

This is not even close to becompleted yet, but the idea is:

1. Learn by filling the database!
2. This is meant to be a mobile app (probably we will be pushing it out through Cordova, or any other..)
3. We will be pushing a notification based on a configuration X times a day with a card, the front of the card is the title and the back will be the content, if you think you already learn the card, just click on "Saved in Mind" This is so we don't show the card anymore in a period of time (configurable?)

• I am staring with angular 1.6.2, just because I was learning it in deep, but we are doing a script for Node.js which has the option to export as json, any framework can be added ( some might not fit well with the structure, we can have that as a separate thing.)

INPUT FORM FOR DEV FLASHCARDS!

Getting Started

To get you started you can simply clone the dev-cards repository and install the dependencies:

Prerequisites

You need git to clone the dev-cards repository. You can get git from here.

We also use a number of Node.js tools to initialize and test dev-cards. You must have Node.js and its package manager (npm) installed. You can get them from here.

Clone dev-cards

Clone the dev-cards repository using git:

git clone [e-mail]:RobertBaron/dev-cards.git
cd dev-cards

If you just want to start a new project without the dev-cards commit history then you can do:

git clone --depth=1 [e-mail]:RobertBaron/dev-cards.git <your-project-name>

The depth=1 tells git to only pull down one commit worth of historical data.

Install Dependencies

We have two kinds of dependencies in this project: tools and Angular framework code. The tools help us manage and test the application.

• We get the tools we depend upon via npm, the Node package manager.
• We get the Angular code via bower, a client-side code package manager.
• In order to run the end-to-end tests, you will also need to have the Java Development Kit (JDK) installed on your machine. Check out the section on end-to-end testing for more info.

We have preconfigured npm to automatically run bower so we can simply do:

npm install

Behind the scenes this will also call bower install. After that, you should find out that you have two new folders in your project.

• node_modules - contains the npm packages for the tools we need
• app/bower_components - contains the Angular framework files

Note that the bower_components folder would normally be installed in the root folder but dev-cards changes this location through the .bowerrc file. Putting it in the app folder makes it easier to serve the files by a web server.

Run the Application

We have preconfigured the project with a simple development web server. The simplest way to start this server is:

npm start

Now browse to the app at localhost:8000/index.html.

Directory Layout

app/                    --> all of the source files for the application
  app.css               --> default stylesheet
  view1/                --> the view1 view template and logic
    home.html            --> the partial template
    home.js              --> the controller logic
    home_test.js         --> tests of the controller
    home.scss            --> Scss of the module
  app.js                --> main application module
  index.html            --> app layout file (the main html template file of the app)
karma.conf.js         --> config file for running unit tests with Karma
e2e-tests/            --> end-to-end tests
  protractor-conf.js    --> Protractor config file
  scenarios.js          --> end-to-end scenarios to be run by Protractor

Testing *Need update in code

There are two kinds of tests in the dev-cards application: Unit tests and end-to-end tests.

Running Unit Tests

The dev-cards app comes preconfigured with unit tests. These are written in Jasmine, which we run with the Karma test runner. We provide a Karma configuration file to run them.

• The configuration is found at karma.conf.js.
• The unit tests are found next to the code they are testing and have an _test.js suffix (e.g. view1_test.js).

The easiest way to run the unit tests is to use the supplied npm script:

npm test

This script will start the Karma test runner to execute the unit tests. Moreover, Karma will start watching the source and test files for changes and then re-run the tests whenever any of them changes. This is the recommended strategy; if your unit tests are being run every time you save a file then you receive instant feedback on any changes that break the expected code functionality.

You can also ask Karma to do a single run of the tests and then exit. This is useful if you want to check that a particular version of the code is operating as expected. The project contains a predefined script to do this:

npm run test-single-run

Running End-to-End Tests

The dev-cards app comes with end-to-end tests, again written in Jasmine. These tests are run with the Protractor End-to-End test runner. It uses native events and has special features for Angular applications.

• The configuration is found at e2e-tests/protractor-conf.js.
• The end-to-end tests are found in e2e-tests/scenarios.js.

Protractor simulates interaction with our web app and verifies that the application responds correctly. Therefore, our web server needs to be serving up the application, so that Protractor can interact with it.

Before starting Protractor, open a separate terminal window and run:

npm start

In addition, since Protractor is built upon WebDriver, we need to ensure that it is installed and up-to-date. The dev-cards project is configured to do this automatically before running the end-to-end tests, so you don't need to worry about it. If you want to manually update the WebDriver, you can run:

npm run update-webdriver

Once you have ensured that the development web server hosting our application is up and running, you can run the end-to-end tests using the supplied npm script:

npm run protractor

This script will execute the end-to-end tests against the application being hosted on the development server.

Note: Under the hood, Protractor uses the Selenium Standalone Server, which in turn requires the Java Development Kit (JDK) to be installed on your local machine. Check this by running java -version from the command line.

If JDK is not already installed, you can download it here.

Updating Angular

Since the Angular framework library code and tools are acquired through package managers (npm and bower) you can use these tools to easily update the dependencies. Simply run the preconfigured script:

npm run update-deps

This will call npm update and bower update, which in turn will find and install the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the package.json and bower.json files respectively.

Loading Angular Asynchronously

The dev-cards project supports loading the framework and application scripts asynchronously. The special index-async.html is designed to support this style of loading. For it to work you must inject a piece of Angular JavaScript into the HTML page. The project has a predefined script to help do this:

npm run update-index-async

This will copy the contents of the angular-loader.js library file into the index-async.html page. You can run this every time you update the version of Angular that you are using.

Serving the Application Files

While Angular is client-side-only technology and it is possible to create Angular web apps that do not require a backend server at all, we recommend serving the project files using a local web server during development to avoid issues with security restrictions (sandbox) in browsers. The sandbox implementation varies between browsers, but quite often prevents things like cookies, XHR, etc to function properly when an HTML page is opened via the file:// scheme instead of http://.

Running the App during Development

The dev-cards project comes preconfigured with a local development web server. It is a Node.js tool called http-server. You can start this web server with npm start, but you may choose to install the tool globally:

sudo npm install -g http-server

Then you can start your own development web server to serve static files from a folder by running:

http-server -a localhost -p 8000

Alternatively, you can choose to configure your own web server, such as Apache or Nginx. Just configure your server to serve the files under the app/ directory.

Running the App in Production

This really depends on how complex your app is and the overall infrastructure of your system, but the general rule is that all you need in production are the files under the app/ directory. Everything else should be omitted. a Angular apps are really just a bunch of static HTML, CSS and JavaScript files that need to be hosted somewhere they can be accessed by browsers.

If your Angular app is talking to the backend server via XHR or other means, you need to figure out what is the best way to host the static files to comply with the same origin policy if applicable. Usually this is done by hosting the files by the backend server or through reverse-proxying the backend server(s) and web server(s).

Continuous Integration

Travis CI

Travis CI is a continuous integration service, which can monitor GitHub for new commits to your repository and execute scripts such as building the app or running tests. The dev-cards project contains a Travis configuration file, .travis.yml, which will cause Travis to run your tests when you push to GitHub.

You will need to enable the integration between Travis and GitHub. See the Travis website for instructions on how to do this.

Based on

AngularJS seed project from angularjs.org.