Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Offline web application with Angular

Last month I wrote a blog about a Progressive Web Application in Vue.js and subsequently I investigated how one could do this all in Angular (version 5.0.1). I am new to Angular and have just started to learn it. I like Vue very much but for an existing work project already using Angular I hope to learn the framework. This doesn't mean I am going to throw Vue out the window, on the contrary I just signed up for the online Vue Master Class just starting out on vueschool.io. I think learning Angular on top of it will only improve my skills in Javascript and and increase my understanding of modern web frameworks.

Angular PWA Example

After reading the quick start documentation on the Angular website in order to get familiar with Angular I went about searching the web for information on how to build PWA application with Angular. I found the following article really useful and built the sample Angular project based on the information I found here:

A new Angular Service Worker — creating automatic progressive web apps. 


The example application they have is called PWAtter and you can find it on GitHub. The example I created and have on GitHub is a very basic Angular application with SW configuration and support based on the articles mentioned in the links above. 

A short note on running the application, to run it in dev you can run the "npm run start" command line. Running in Dev doesn't enable Service Worker support. To run it with the Service Worker support you need to run in production mode and with a http server, the command for the project is "npm run serve-prod-ngsw".

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Storytellers - a Vue, NUXT, SSR, Vuetify, Firebase [Auth, Firestore, Storage, Functions] application

I am trying to develop an web application from the ground up in order for me to really learn and understand modern web development. I wrote a blog entry when I first started out and I have continued to work on the sample application.

There is very little you can do with the application but it covers a lot of ground already. I have managed to covers all the tiers I am trying to learn:


Hopefully, if I have time, I can add more functionality to it so that it looks and feels like a proper functional application.

What is the web application about? Well at the moment it allows a user to upload images to Firebase storage and displays thumbnails on the home screen. Sounds amazing. Ultimately I would like to 'expand' on that :-) and end up with a community driven application providing a platform for the creative and artistic to share and collaborate their stories and ideas with one another.

Yeah so arguably that idea is pointless and ... yeah it might be ... but it allows me to try many different things and covers many different technology stacks so I am going to learn a lot by doing this.

I don't expect anyone to be interested in "collaborating" with me in development but I want to keep this opensource and invite anyone out there who is keen and able to contribute to the development of this project. Feel free to fork the repository, raise issues and submit pull requests.