Have You Plunk’d Lately?

Chris Berry Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript Leave a Comment

More than once as a developer, I’ve come across the need to quickly prototype an idea or solution. This generally involves making a special project with all the necessary local parts, then going in and making the prototype. Doing this takes time and effort for something which in the end will probably just be throwaway code. Luckily I’ve now found a better way.

“Plunker is a tool to prototype, experiment, share and debug your ideas on the web platform. From idea to implementation, Plunker helps you build something quickly and frictionlessly.”

I’ve found Plunker to be a great tool to use when I quickly need to test out an idea or solution. I no longer have to go through the process of creating a whole application locally just to see if I can do a loop with some data or something else just as simple. Now I can simply choose a template from Plunker, and I can get down to business.

In this blog I will introduce Plunker, showing how to use it to quickly create and edit an Angular startup project…

Taking A Mixed Approach To Single-Page Applications

Chris Berry Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Single-Page Application Leave a Comment

A coworker came to me with a problem. The client he was working with would be building hundreds of single-page applications and all would need to be tied into a single shell application. He had first attempted to use an iFrame contained within another single-page application to display the child applications.

While this worked, he came up against another requirement: the child applications may or may not need access to data from the parent shell application.

It was at this point he came to me for suggestions. I had been playing with this exact idea for sometime; how can you manage a collection of Single-Page Applications and still share data between them?

At this point, I decided to create a hybrid solution of mixing Single-Page Applications with a server-rendered shell application. The following is the process I took for creating this solution, highlighting some of the pain points with some suggestions for further enhancements.