AngularJS: Up and Running

Introduction

I remember the very first time I was introduced to AngularJS. It was called Angular, and it was an open source library built as a hobby by one of my fellow engineers, Misko. At that point, we had spent months struggling to develop Google Feedback (the project we were developing) in an efficient and maintainable manner. We had written over 18,000 lines of code, a lot of which were untested, and were frustrated with our inability to continue adding features quickly. Misko Hevery, the engineer I mentioned, made a bold statement that he could reproduce everything we had developed in the past six months within two weeks. I should mention that we were all Java engineers at that point, with a complete lack of JavaScript knowledge.

After what we expected to be an entertaining two weeks of watching Misko struggle, scramble, and fail, it wasn’t done. But one more week later, he had replicated what took us six months. What had been an 18,000-line codebase had dropped to a mere 1,500 lines, and almost every single piece of functionality was modular, reusable, and testable. Misko was on to something!

Brad Green, this book’s coauthor, saw the beginning of something amazing there, and decided with Misko to build a team around the core idea of making it simple to build web applications. Google Feedback, which I was leading, became the first project to ship with AngularJS, and really helped us understand what was important from a web developer’s perspective in a JavaScript framework. ...