Angular 2 ES6 Starter

This repo stands as a starting point for those who try Angular 2 in Javascript. It shows techniques how easy development can be also without Typescript. It is a basic CRUD application with authentication, similar to the news site jslive.com. You can see the list of links, add and edit them after you signed in.

• Uses Babel to support class/parameter decorators.
• No Typescript included.
• Bundles files with Webpack.
• Automates tasks with Gulp.
• Automatically rebundles and refreshes the browser on changes.
• Unit testing with Karma and Jasmine.
• E2E testing with Protractor.
• Includes deployment to Heroku.
• Linting with ESlint based on Airbnb's styleguide.
• Optional typing with Flow.

Motivation

There are plenty of resources for starter packs and documentations on how to write your Angular 2 application in Typescript. The official documentation is only complete for Typescript and the parts which are also in Javascript are so few and in ES5 syntax which is little bit verbose compared to ES6. This is why i decided to make a starter pack to show that equivalent easy and viable solutions exist in Javascript.

It does not want to be by any means an against Typescript repository, just a choice for people, who like the loosely typed nature of Javascript or just feel overwhelmed by having to learn both Angular 2 and Typescript when trying out the new framework. By adding Flow types and using decorators wherever you can, it will be really easy to switch to Typescript by adding type definitions to the project (if you want to).

Concepts covered

• Creating components with directives
• Communication between child and parent components
• Dependency injection for services
• Change detection strategies
• Using custom pipes in templates
• Handling HTTP calls
• Using observables
• Routing
• Authentication and restricting access to routes
• Form handling
• Using custom validators in forms
• Internationalization

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/blacksonic/angular2-es6-starter.git
cd angular2-es6-starter
npm install

gulp serve

It bundles the application, copies the static files and starts the webserver with Nodemon. The transpiled application will have two separate ES5 compatible files: vendor.js for vendor libraries, boot.js for application logic. Server side changes restart the server, client side changes rebundle the Angular 2 application and refresh the page with Livereload.

Note: The application needs at least Node 4+ installed.

Open it in your browser http://localhost:9000 and start coding your first Angular 2 application in Javascript!

Testing

gulp test

Runs tests with Karma and Jasmine. Uses a single entry point (setup.spec.js), which includes all the *.spec.js files and runs the tests inside them. The test files can be found in the client/app folder next to the source files.

Because a clean bundling with Webpack can take multiple seconds, it is not ideal for development to run a clean test run every time. Instead it can run continuously on your development machine.

gulp test-dev

ES6 workarounds

Dependency Injection

By default parameter injection doesn't work as in Typescript, instead we need to define the parameters getter in the class.

@Injectable()
export class UserService {
  static get parameters() {
    return [[Http]];
  }

  constructor(http) {
    this._http = http;
  }
}

If we want to be standard complaint we can use this technique. Examples for this can be found in the auth module directory.

To make it less verbose we can use Flow types with the help of babel-plugin-angular2-annotations and babel-plugin-transform-flow-strip-types.

@Injectable()
export class UserService {
  constructor(http: Http) {
    this._http = http;
  }
}

Just added the type to the constructor and it works as with parameters getter. To see it in action take a look at the post module directory.

For a more detailed description about dependency injection possibilities read this article.

Component Inputs

By default @Input decorators for empty properties won't work, instead it can be written into the @Component decorator.

@Component({
  selector: 'list-item',
  template: template,
  inputs: ['post']
})
export class ListItemComponent {
  post;
}

You can see it work inside post module's list-item component.

To overcome this babel-plugin-angular2-annotations helps us to enable ``@Input``` decorators for empty properties. Now it can be written less verbose.

@Component({
  selector: 'post-form',
  template: template
})
export class FormComponent {
  @Input()
  post;

  @Output()
  saved = new EventEmitter();
}

You can see it work inside post module's form component.

Authentication

Authentication is solved by extending the default RouterOutlet and adding logic to it's activate method. This solution is preferred for now, because the @CanActivate router lifecycle decorator has no access to the application's dependency injection, only with workarounds. For a detailed explanation read this article.

Deployment (to Heroku)

It bundles the client application and copies static files and server files to the dist directory along with package.json. Then it can be commited to the desired location (for example Heroku).

gulp dist

cd dist
git init
git add -A .
git commit -m "Deploy #1" && echo Committed
git push -f [email protected]:angular2-es6-starter.git master

Check out the deployed version.