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Ember Ordr: An Ember.js demo

Angular Ordr: An AngularJS demo

A simple restaurant's order management demo app:

  • That lets one manage a tab of orders made at each table in the restaurant.
  • A list of tables is on the left. When a table is selected, display the list of food items and an order menu of items ordered
  • Allow adding food items to the order menu. Show the cost of each added item and the total.

Live Demo: in Angular and in Ember (diff)

Rewrite notes

I bought Peepcode's latest one on Ember.js and completed the demo Ember app. The screencast was very well done and based on my findings, I think it's the best source to get started with Ember.js at the moment.

As I'm evaluating Ember.js vs AngularJS to use for a project (with Rails backend), I'm rewriting the app in AngularJS so as to compare them. This is based on the original idea by @IgorMinar who rewrote Peepcode's Music Player Backbone.js app into AngularJS: https://github.com/angular/peepcode-tunes

I swapped out Ember.js framework files with AngularJS files first (to reduce noise), then did the whole conversion in a single commit here.

I have a few limited personal observations and opinions below. Being new to both frameworks, I'll appreciate any corrections or comments.

Ember.js:

  • Pros:

    • Support for relationship between models
    • Better support for RESTful resources
    • Better support for nested controllers
    • Better layout support with {{ outlet }}, {{ partial "something" }} and {{ render "something" }}
    • Handlebar templates are string templates and independent on DOM parsing

  • Cons:

    • Verbose templating. Having too many <script type="text/x-handlebars" on a single page isn't fun to maintain

AngularJS:

  • Pros:

    • Don't have to worry about binding via set/get. Dirty checking FTW
    • HTML is much more concise and easier to read in the editor with ng-repeat than with handlebar syntax
    • Haven't written tests for this but it does feel that it would be easier to write (also thanks to great test documentation)

  • Cons:

    • Awkward layout structure with ng-view and ng-include
    • Awkward support for nesting controllers

I end up preferring AngularJS for its great documentation, concise syntax and great binding support. My main concern with Angular is I find Ember and Backbone's Model-centric style more intuitive. I still don't know how to have a Model-like encapsulation in Angular. Is there any good way to have model relationships (HasMany/BelongsTo) like Ember does? The ugliest code in this ember-to-angular conversion was to handle the loading of records of different "models". I took a quick look at "angular-resource" but it didn't seem to help for this example. Admittedly, the input (via FIXTURES) that Peepcode came up with was for Ember.js, so naturally it's easier to parse with Ember.js.

Usage:

Run:

bin/server

Then visit http://localhost:3000 There's also a live demo hosted here

(Bonus) REST backend

@xinsight implemented a RESTful backend over at https://github.com/xinsight/angular-ordr/tree/rest-backend if you are interested. Notes below are from his branch:

The original angular-ordr had a lot of code to manage the client-side-only data structure. I was curious how the angular code would look with a proper backend, so I created one using Restify and node.js.

To start the REST server:

npm install -g restify
node server/server.js

Supported REST URLs:

# view tables
curl -i http://localhost:3001/tables
# view details for a table (tab items)
curl -i http://localhost:3001/tables/1
# view foods
curl -i http://localhost:3001/foods
# add food item 3 to table 1  (POST)
curl -d "" -i http://localhost:3001/tables/1/foods/3
# remove food item from table
curl -X DELETE -i http://localhost:3001/tables/1/tabitem/100

Access to the REST server is contained in a service, which is used by the various controllers. The only part that seemed crufty was having to use the $rootScope to store the table details, so that they could be accessed by two controllers. (One controller adds elements to the tab, and another removes elements. When they used $scope, they interface would occasionally ignore adds and deletes.)

Two important omissions in this demo: unit testing and robust handling of network errors.

License:

All my code as well as AngularJS are licensed under the [MIT license]. I already asked Peepcode and was approved to use the Ember.js code to convert into AngularJS