Angular, REST and U2
June 14, 2017
Web developers today are building increasingly sophisticated front end clients that need to be backed by a heady mixture of ease of use and high performance business logic. Speed and scalability are everything in the drive to bring engaging and proactive experiences to your customers. Websites must compete for our attention and we, as consumers, expect only the best.
The platforms and conventions that have risen to this challenge reflect a very different world view to the hegemony of the relational protocols of only a few years ago. MultiValue platforms, such as the Rocket U2 family, with their rich heritage, strong business language and complex data model are perfectly placed to take advantage of these opportunities.
Angular, from Google, lies at the forefront of this revolution. Angular has evolved into a mature and exciting framework allowing teams to build and test hugely scalable web sites that behave more like desktop applications than traditional web pages. The old AngularJS has been wholly replaced with a component-driven model offering data binding, deep routing, and a template-driven approach that takes away much of the pain of writing and maintaining Single Page Applications.
In this series, I will be walking through just one of the many development stacks available to modern U2 developers: Angular with Bootstrap; REST APIs and the U2 application development platform. The U2 model is nothing if not flexible and open, and so we will look at two very different approaches to exposing U2 functionality through REST; using the built-in U2 RESTful Services and taking a multi-tiered approach using .NET Web API.
In this first post Blog – Angular, REST and U2 Part 1, we will set up an Angular project to run using Visual Studio 2017 and explore the workings of the Angular model. This will give you the basic building blocks to understanding the Angular framework and introduce TypeScript, the highly typed JavaScript derivative used for declaring and writing Angular components. We will learn how Angular components interact to form a Single Page Application.
This series is pitched at those U2 developers new to Angular, TypeScript and REST. Some knowledge of the U2 model and languages is required. If you need to discover more, please download my free tutorial ‘Writing your First U2 Application’ from http://www.brianleach.co.uk. This steps you through the process of building a simple .NET application for U2 from first principles.
