Learn Alpine, Cycle and Jasmine

Welcome to this beginner level series on Alpine JS! 👋🏞

Alpine JS is a rugged, minimal framework for composing JavaScript behaviour in your markup. It brings declarative, reactive, data-driven nature of libraries like React or Vue to your HTML templates.

In this series, you will learn about Alpine's handy **directives**. You'll discover how to define a component scope with `x-data`, run code on mount with `x-init`, attach event listeners with `x-on`, display data with `x-text`, decide wether or not to show an element with `x-show`, iterate through data with `x-for`, retrieve a DOM element with `x-ref`, learn how to achieve _two-way data binding_ with `x-model`, and much more.

You'll also learn how **"modifiers"** can be applied and chained to directives to provide additional functionality: control the animation transition of entering and leaving DOM elements, debounce an event listener, etc.

We'll also touch on what Alpine calls **"magic properties"**, which give you access to native browser events (`$event`), reference to DOM elements (`$refs`), and more.

You'll gradually discover Alpine's API and syntax, from building simple tabs to a mini app that fetches a dog picture based on a "breed" search field. 🐶

**Get ready to breathe some fresh air** - it's time to walk into cool, green Alpine pastures! 🏞

Alpine.js offers you the reactive and declarative nature of big frameworks like Vue or React at a much lower cost.

You get to keep your DOM, and sprinkle in behavior as you see fit.

alpine

Sprinkle declarative, reactive behaviour on your HTML with Alpine JS

Cycle.js is a framework where your app is described as a simple function taking an event stream as input and outputting an event stream. 

Cycle.js builds on functional and reactive streams and is a JavaScript framework. What does that mean? In the course, André Staltz, the creator of Cycle.js, will explain it to us.

We'll start this course with an empty project and build out our own toy version of Cycle.js to understand exactly what's going on under the hood. When we have a solid base of how Cycle.js works we will move on to use the Cycle.js API and build an app using the Model-View-Intent pattern.

Cycle.js is a framework where your app is described as a simple function taking an event stream as input and outputting an event stream.

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Cycle.js Fundamentals

We are starting to get a better architecture for these UI apps. But we still have a problem of repeating code for the sliders, since they share so much in common in looks and functionality. This lessons shows how we can create a generic labeled slider as a main() function receiving properties as sources.

Create a Generic Cycle.js Component

Our app is not yet a BMI calculator, because it only has two sliders, but doesn't show the calculated BMI number. In this lesson we will learn how to export any stream from a child component and use it in the parent component, in order to display the BMI calculation on the DOM.

Export Values from Components through Sinks in Cycle.js

This lesson shows what can be learned next as a continuation of this course, and gives a recap on the core concepts: main for pure logic, drivers for side effects, run() to connect main and drivers, sources for read effects, sinks for write effects, and nesting Cycle.js apps to work as components.

Overview of Cycle.js

Let's see next how to use the HTTP driver to generate requests and capture responses. We will build a small app to fetch a single piece of data from a REST server and display that on the DOM.

Fetch Data using the Cycle.js HTTP Driver

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

In this lesson Trevor looks at testing AngularJS controllers with scope inheritance with Jasmine and test spies.

Testing Controllers With Dependencies

Once we have a labeled slider component inside the main function, we should be able to create another labeled slider. This lesson teaches how to accomplish that, and make sure those two instances work independently of each other.

Use Multiple Independent Instances of a Cycle.js Component

We added classNames to pre-processing and post-processing steps when calling the LabeledSlider, in order to instances independent of each other. It would be better if we could hide these steps away. This lesson introduces the isolate() helper function to achieve that.

Isolate Component Instances in Cycle.js

This lesson is the first in an introduction to Cycle.js. We will see how to build from scratch a toy version of Cycle.js. See how to use RxJS to create simple web apps, and how to separate logic from effects.

Separate Logic from Effects in Cycle.js

We need to give structure to our application with logic and effects. This lessons shows how we can organize our code into two parts: main() function for logic, and effects functions for effects.

Organize Code in the Main and Effect Functions

How can we show one string on the DOM, and a completely different string on Console log? This lesson shows how we can make our main function return multiple Observables, each one targeted at a different type of effect.

Customize Effects from the Main Function

What if we wanted to change the behavior of our app reset the timer every time the mouse *hovers* over it? Currently we only support clicks, and they are hard coded in the DOM Driver. This lesson will introduce DOMSource.selectEvents(), a way of making the DOM Source rich and allowing the main() function to determine which read effects it needs.

Fine-grained Control over the DOM Source in Cycle.js

Now you should have a good idea what Cycle.run does, and what the DOM Driver is. In this lesson, we will not build a toy version of Cycle.js anymore. Instead, we will learn how to use Cycle.js to solve problems. We will start by making a simple Hello world application.

Read Text Input in a Cycle.js Hello World Application

Usually we use template languages like Handlebars, JSX, and Jade to create. One simple way we can create our own template language is to write a function that returns these objects for us. This lessons shows how we can use these functions as a DSL to create our DOM description objects.

Use Hyperscript in Cycle.js as an Alternative to Template Languages

So far we have been writing very small apps in Cycle.js. Let's start growing the size of the apps we build. This time, we will see how to build a simple Body-Mass Index Calculator. We'll see how as our application grows there are three distinct sections: handling read effects, handling write effects, and handling internal state.



Manage Multiple Observable Streams in Cycle.js

We built the BMI calculator all inside one function: main(). As apps scale, we don't want main() to grow. We need an organized pattern where each function focuses on doing one thing. This lesson shows how we can easily refactor the main() function into three parts: Intent, Model, and View.

Organize your Cycle.js Application into the Model-View-Intent Pattern

We have made a Cycle.js app for generic labeled slider which can be configured through props, but how can we reuse it in other Cycle.js apps? This lesson shows how we can embed any Cycle program inside a larger Cycle program in a very simple manner.

Use a Cycle.js Component in the main() Function

Custom Jasmine Matchers are a great way to keep your AngularJS Unit Tests clean and tidy. We want to make expectations **readable** and express the intent of the test. Custom matchers help to accomplish this.

Custom Jasmine 1.3 Matchers

Our application was able to produce write effects, through sinks, and was able to receive read effects, through the DOM sources. However, the main function only gets the DOMSource as input. This lessons shows how we can generalize main to receive an object of sources, containing all kinds of read effects that we can use.

Use the Cycle.js run() Function

The last part of the code we wrote is neither logic nor effects. It is code which ties together logic (main) with effects. We can encapsulate that in a run() function. This lesson shows how we can structure these pieces together, and generalize effect handling with "drivers".

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