Sunday, August 23, 2015

Getting Started with Angular Web Apps the Easy Way

You're in a rush to build a single-page web app.

So, you picked Angular. Excellent choice! It's just that getting started with Angular can be a bit of a daunting task.

Most people point out that the learning curve is quite steep for you to get to a point where you can do something useful with Angular.

I'll point out a better way for you to get started, especially if you aren't here simply to learn but rather because you need to build your web app.

The concept is to pick up just a basic understanding of the parts that make up Angular and how they come together, and follow it up with a Bootstrap+Angular template that can do most of the work for you.

Most of your road blocks and time sinks will go away if you:

1) have a very basic understanding of Angular, and
2) couple it with a Bootstrap+Angular template that can provide these necessary items:

a) good level of design (allows you to skip the CSS work)
b) typical UI components, beyond what html provides (and even page layouts: landing page, log-in page, etc.)
c) usage of Grunt for automation, optimization, and various other tasks

So start with a full-working web app demoing every piece of the template, then you can just copy-and-paste to build what you need instead of trying to build things from scratch.

This is the approach I've taken in the past with great results, which is why I'm recommending it to you now.

Check out the template I worked with in the past. Here's why it works really well:

- it uses Bootstrap and Angular
- it provides all the typical UI components (both from Bootstrap and things they built themselves)
- it has a great level of design so that your web app doesn't look embarrassing
- it comes with a Grunt config that includes live reload for development and packaging and optimizations for deployment: css and javascript file concatenation, minification, less compilation, etc. This is all stuff that would take a lot of time to set up and configure properly, so huge time saver!

Lastly, if you're looking for a great place to host your web app at a great price, Webfaction has you covered: awesome servers, great price, and attentive customer service.

PS: Need a web app built? Hire me. I provide web development consulting services with a focus on data analytics and visualization. You can read more about and contact me on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/heliodor. If you want to email me instead, "heliodorj" is my username at Gmail.