Angular JS Overview

By Jamie|energy efficiency apps, mobile app development|Be the first to comment!

Stopwattch, an angular js app

Cross platform app development using Angular.js

 
We are into our 25th hour of the hackathon, and we thought we would provide some insight to the development design of our mobile app, which is Angular JS.  Angular JS is an open source framework for Javascript, which is an old school language common in web development that is getting some new life as HTML5.
 
Instead of writing code directly in languages for iPhones (objective c) or android phones (javascript), we are building an app that “lives” on our website as a mobile version.  When this angular app is downloaded for iPhone or android phones, the app basically opens our mobile site in safari or chrome browser and interacts with you through that browser, although you don’t notice this directly.  This is very common in development today, and Facebook’s mobile app works the same way.
 

An angular app, using mobile development tools available today

 
Doing app development this way loses a bit of speed and perhaps assets from your smartphone or tablet.  For example,   However, you gain the ability to develop across multiple platforms with consistency, which can be really valuable to maintain and make updates to the product as well.
 
Our developer, Trevor, described Angular JS (which is recently getting quite popular at Google) to me in an analogy.  ”It is like you are asking for a document from your lawyer.  If you use HTML, you ask the app for a file, and he goes to his office and faxes the doc to you.  However, with Angular JS, it is like the lawyer has a tablet in front of you and can show you the document in front of you.  He doesn’t need to go back to his office, or send anything to you – it is all accessible all the time.”
 
Keep following our posts from this weekend on the development of our mobile app, which should be live by 8:30am Monday.