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Doubly geeky stuff: AngularJS meets Marvel comics

Let’s face it: despite us having very serious titles like Principal Consultant, Senior Software Architect or Team Leader, most of us are geeks through and through. Each shows it in a different way; some fiddle with machines, some like cosplay, me I like comic books.

When I learned that Marvel Comics provided a developers REST API, I couldn’t resist playing with it. I’m more of a backend guy, and though I love Vaadin, using it to call REST services would be like proxying with no added value. Though I’ve no prior experience with AngularJS, this is a much more relevant option in this case. This article is by no mean a how-to article, on the contrary, it contains many questions and some answers I’ve come across. In no particular order, those are the following:

Using webjars with Maven

Front-end is front-end, period. I used Maven with webjars to get AngularJS and Bootstrap dependencies, but it doesn’t add anything. Worse, it adds an unecessary build process. It would have been to better to use a relevant tool like Bower. Lesson learned: use tools tailored to your language.

Using Tomcat inside IntelliJ IDEA

Likewise, using a back-end tool means no added value value but instead added complexity. It only slows down the development process. A simple web server would have been good enough.

Knowing about $resource

After using $http for a few hours, I learned about $resource. It is much better and more usable than $http. However, this requires an optional AngularJS module, ngResource, which in turn needs an additional <script> include in the HTML page.

AngularJS and Bootstrap integration

I’ve used Bootstrap for styling, because I suck at doing style sheets myself. Fortunately, there’s an dedicated Bootstrap directive for AngularJS, but I didn’t use it.

Fragment cache

I used ngView to create a Single-Page Interface application. However, AngularJS has some powerful caching features, that prevents the rendered page to be updated. In order to bypass caching, I used Firefox’s private window.

Paging synchronization

The Characters list REST service has paging capabilities. Using $index in ngRepeat for numbering with $resource fetching, I get some de-synchronization between the renumbering that occurs nearly instantly and the resource fetching.

Variable columns

I have tried multiple combinations of ngClass, ngSwitch and ngIf directives to have div columns spanning different Bootstrap units…​ to no avail. Any suggestion?

Pull-requests are welcome, as well as advices, so I can improve. In all cases, please provide the reason behind, I’m an engineer after all.

The complete source code for this post can be found on Github.
Nicolas Fränkel

Nicolas Fränkel

Developer Advocate with 15+ years experience consulting for many different customers, in a wide range of contexts (such as telecoms, banking, insurances, large retail and public sector). Usually working on Java/Java EE and Spring technologies, but with focused interests like Rich Internet Applications, Testing, CI/CD and DevOps. Also double as a trainer and triples as a book author.

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Doubly geeky stuff: AngularJS meets Marvel comics
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