Learn Algolia, Ember and Radium

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

algolia

Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

Ember is a javascript framework that provides a rich set of tools for building modern web applications. Unlike many frameworks, Ember comes with opinions and a way of doing things so you aren't left with a ton of decisions to make about problems that have already been solved very well. Ember was designed from the start to deliver a productive and comfortable experience for you, the developer.

In this course you will learn what you need to know to get started building your own Ember we applications. From the absolute essentials like creating a new project with the Ember-CLI tools, templating, routing, and reusable components.



A JavaScript framework for creating ambitious web applications.

ember

Ember 2 Fundamentals

Components in Ember are great for reusing code throughout our application. We’ll see how each instance of an Ember component has isolated state and we can over ride as well as set default values.

In this lesson, we will learn how to make a simple, reusable component within an Ember application.

Create Simple Components in Ember

In this lesson, we learn how to create nested routes and templates in an Ember.js application, in addition to how to create nested routes and isolated templates.

Creating nested routes in Ember.js

In this lesson, we will learn how templates work within Ember and how to use HTMLBars. This lesson will cover the connection between controllers and templates and how to use actions within templates as well.

Ember Templating with HTMLBars

In this lesson, we will learn how to install Ember Inspector and use it to see the state of our application and debug it.

The Ember Inspector can be installed from the [Chrome Web Store](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ember-inspector/bmdblncegkenkacieihfhpjfppoconhi). We will see how the inspector gives us access to information such as the routes available to us, the components used in a particular view, and data that is exposed to us etc.


Debug Ember Applications using Ember Inspector

In Ember.js, functions that are executed through user interaction with your application are called actions, which can be defined at the route, controller, or component level. In this tutorial, we look at a simple example of defining actions on the controller and hooking it up to our template in order to update properties on the controller.

Add user interaction to Ember.js apps using actions

We will learn how to install Ember-CLI and use it to create a new Ember project. We will also learn how to run the Ember project.

Create an Ember Project with the Ember-CLI

In this lesson, we show how to specify a model for an Ember Route so its data can be displayed. 

Define Models for Routes in Ember

In this lesson we will create an `updateContent` method that sets the value of our `content` property to the current epoch timestamp. We need to call `toString()` on the `Date.now()` method in order to make TypeScript happy.

```
updateContent() {
  this.content = Date.now().toString()
}
```

We create a constructor that takes the options parameter, call `super(options)` and call into our `this.updateContent()` method.

```
constructor(options) {
  super(options)
  this.updateContent()
}
```

When we refresh our page we can see that the value of `content` is set to the epoch timestamp. 

To make the content really dynamic we use `setInterval()` to call into `updateContent` each second: `setInterval(() => this.updateContent(), 1000)`.

When we save our file we see that our content does not get updated anymore and when we check the console we see that we get an error telling us that: The 'content' property on the my-component component was changed after it had been rendered. The error also informs us that we should Use the @tracked decorator to mark this as a tracked property.

We add the @tracked decorator to our property, we import tracked from @glimmer/component and we refresh the page. We verify that `content` gets updated each second.

We change our `updateContent` to add our the timestamp to the array. When we use `this.items.push(this.content)` to achieve this we see that the list does not get updated. This is because the `@tracked` decorator only tracks the re-assignment of properties.

The way to get this working is by re-assigning our `items` array inside `updateContent`. We assign a new array, de-structure the current items array and add the new content.

```
this.items = [...this.items, this.content]
```



Use dynamic data in a GlimmerJS component

In this lesson, we will learn how to define routes within an Ember application and how to use them to navigate around your application. This lesson will cover the basics of routes and how we can use nested routes to display multiple templates at the same time. We can also cover redirect routes and manually forcing transitions through actions.

Define Routes in Ember 2.0 using Ember-CLI

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

In a CSS library like Bootstrap we can set a button's style to be "primary" or "secondary" by appending classes. For React components we want to be able to do this via props. Radium enables this by composing styles via an array. This mimicks the cascade of CSS.  

Radium: Updating Button Styles via Props

In this lesson we will use the ember cli to generate a new component. Running `ember g glimmer-component my-component` generates the template and component class. We change the content of our component and add it to the main template in order to show it on the page.

Create a new GlimmerJS component

In this lesson we will add a variable called `content` to our component class, initialize it as a string and display the variable in our class using the double curly braces syntax, which is the handlebars expression for expressions, `{ {content }}`. 

After this we create a new class variable called `items`, initialize it as an array with strings. To display this list in our template we add a `<ul></ul>` and inside this unordered list we use the handlebars `each` helper to display the list items.

And inside our each statement we will print a `<li>` tag and render `{{ item}}` inside it.

```
<ul>
  {{#each items key="@index" as |item| }}
    <li>{{item}}</li> 
  {{/each}}
</ul>
```



Use template variables in a GlimmerJS component

React's inline styles allow components to stand on their own by not requiring any external CSS. However HTML's style attributes don't support pseudo selectors like `:hover` and `:active`. By using Radium to listen to mouse events we can restore `:hover` and `:active` selectors to inline styles.

Styling a React button component with Radium

Closure actions are useful for extending application code such as modifying a property on a controller while also sending up information from a component.
In this lesson, we learn how to use closure actions with Ember.js components. 

Use Closure Actions with Ember Components

[GlimmerJS](https://glimmerjs.com/) is a UI component library built by the Ember.js team. It is fast and lightweight and uses a combination of TypeScript and Handlebars to build the components.   

In this lesson we will use the Ember CLI to initialize a new GlimmerJS project.

We will start by installing Ember CLI globally by running `npm install -g ember-cli/ember-cli`.

Next we will use the `ember` command to create our new project by running `ember new egghead-glimmer -b @glimmer/blueprint` . 

When our project is created we `cd` into the project directory and start the development server. We will view the page in the browser and change the base template.

Initialize a project using Glimmer.js

This will get you started on how to setup the Javascript API client of Algolia search solution. To follow along the video having a free Algolia account already setup will make things easier (but is not required). Once the client is setup we will test it by pushing a couple of records to an index.  

Set up the Algolia JavaScript Client

We’ll load a simple JSON file containing 500 actors records from disk and push it to our Algolia index using the Javascript API client.

Push JSON Data to an Algolia Index from the JavaScript Client

We’ll learn how to push a small amount of data from a local MySQL database to an Algolia index. The first step is to connect to the DB using the `mysql` package, then select all records from the DB and finally push them to Algolia using the JS API client.

Push MySQL Data to an Algolia Index from the JS Client

Using the Lodash library, we’ll see how to split large amounts of data from a local MySQL database into smaller chunks and push them to an Algolia index.  

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