Tuesday, March 31, 2015

My summer 2015 MEAN project: Setting up

So let’s get started. my set up:
  1. Visual Studio: community edition with Nodejs tools. I can hear the WTFs from here. Why? Because it’s an excellent IDE for node development, we can get it for free and I know a couple of people who go into a blind rage when I something from the evil empire. Yes, let the hate flow through you.

    But seriously, any text editor will do if you don’t to use VS.
  2. Fiddler. We need something to debug and test our REST API. We could just use a web browser like…...IE (hehehehe) but sometimes we need to drill down to the raw parts to debug. Besides, it’s another free software.

    Postman can be an alternative.
  3. Sign up for Azure. This is the iffy part because you need a credit card. Azure does have a generous free trial and a teacher/student program via DreamSpark. But if Azure rubs you the wrong way then you can do a local VM like turnkey. It’s the same thing. But if you really, really must use something else then there's Openshift or DigitalOcean or Heroku or Amazon. All these services have free trial accounts in some form.
  4. Github via SourceTree. Someone once said, “you’re not a developer unless you have github.” But if you go all ghetto on me, there’s Bitbucket or Codeplex.

    As for SourceTree, it’s another free software for code repos. It works with Git and Mercurial repos. You could opt for a the command line, I won’t judge you. I mean, I can’t judge someone on how they enjoy pain.
  5. Nodejs and NPM stuff. Install node is straight-forward affair. The stuff you have to do after sort of isn’t. The tribe of terminal user will rejoice this part. 
    • ExpressJS. We need it because a node app isn't much without express
    • bower. We need bower because I’m lazy and don’t want to the whole dance of google, download, unpack and copy for web stuff. 
    • mongoose. Because MongoDB database.
  6. Mongolab account. Mongolab does MongoDB as a Service and they have a free plan with 500MB on it to try out. If you don’t want to then you can install MongoDB on your PC or use a VM.
And that’s it. We got our dev environment set.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

My summer 2015 MEAN project: Dormmetita

Dormmetita. That's the name of the app we are building.

I asked a question over at the CDO-ITG FB page a couple of weeks ago what would the community like to read or do over the summer. I had a couple of options for Java, Node and Python. The overall winner though was nodejs. So for the summer I'm doing a MEAN tutorial to build an old app that a couple of guys "brainstormed" about a year back named Dormmetita. Right, +Romar Mayer Micabalo+Paul Michael Labis+Raven Duran?

Technically it's "Dorm me, tita." which is an app to find and post dorm rooms, apartments for students localized to my city, Cagayan de Oro which is a university town. We might throw in reviews but let's keep it simple for now. We can make up stuff as we go.

 I've broken down the tutorial in these topics:
  1. Setting up 
  2. Node is up: hello world
  3. Coding the REST services (Part 1) - The Model
  4. Finish the REST (Part 2) with Fiddler debugging and testing
  5. Bootstrapping the view parts 
  6. Add Angular to the page
  7. Deploy to Azure, because free is nice

So bookmark this post to follow.