Learn Angularfire, Browserify and Clojurescript

Gulp is a toolkit for automating painful or time-consuming tasks in your development workflow, so you can stop messing around and build something.

gulp

Building upon the `watch` task that we begin this lesson with, we’ll look at how to create a local development server using the `app` directory as the web root. By using Browsersync to achieve this, we can also instruct all connected browsers to automatically reload each time our bundle is re-generated. Browsersync has a public `.stream()` method that is designed exactly for this purpose.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Live Reload with Browsersync

Babel has support for the latest version of JavaScript through syntax transformers. These plugins allow you to use new syntax, right now without waiting for browser support.

babel

What is already a nice workflow using Gulp, Browserify, Watchify & Browsersync to enable auto rebuilds & live browser reloading can be further improved by adding Babelify. A simple wrapper around the popular transpiler Babel, Babelify can ‘transform’ source files as they pass through our stream to enable certain Javascript features not yet available in the Browser or Node. We end the lesson by looking at how to generate & extract sourcemaps using `exorcist`.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Babel & Source Maps

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

Firebase provides a real-time syncing backend for your AngularJS applications in very few lines of code. In this lesson, you'll learn how to get started integrating it into your app.

Get Started with Firebase and AngularFire

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

browserify

Let's look at the basics of setting up Gulp and Browserify. Creating a Gulp task from scratch, we'll cover how to utilise the Browserify API to generate a single `bundle.js` file, catch and log any errors that occur in the compilation process, transform the stream into a format that can be consumed by `gulp.dest` and finish by writing the bundle to a `dist` directory.

Gulp and Browserify - Initial Setup

Beginning with a single Gulp task capable of generating a one-time Browserify bundle, we enable file-watching and incremental rebuilds by incorporating Watchify. We add a second task `watch` & refactor our initial code to enable the bulk of it to be re-used. We’ll look at exactly how to ‘wire’ these tools together and how the relationship between Watchify & Browserify can manifest into a seriously efficient workflow.

Gulp and Browserify - Hooking up Watchify

ClojureScript is a compiler for Clojure that targets JavaScript. It emits JavaScript code which is compatible with the advanced compilation mode of the Google Closure optimizing compiler.

clojurescript

In this lesson I show you how to get and manipulate command-line arguments in Clojure/ClojureScript by writing a small program that greets you by name. I also show how comments are delimited, how to get a value out of a sequence, how to bind a symbol to a value, and how to define a function.

Handle command-line arguments in ClojureScript


Clojure is a dynamic, general-purpose programming language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language, yet remains completely dynamic – every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.

clojure

In this lesson I show what a Clojure keyword is and why we prefer them as keys in maps; and the three ways we can look up a value in a map.

Keywords and Map Lookup in Clojure and ClojureScript

AngularFire is the officially supported AngularJS binding for Firebase. Firebase is a backend service that provides data storage, file storage, authentication, and static website hosting for your Angular app.

angularfire

You'll learn the 2 Observables that Firebase Authentication provides to subscribe to the authentication state of your application, `authState` and `user`.

You'll see how they both return the same `User` object from Firebase Authentication.

And you'll learn that the difference is that `authState` triggers when the user logs in, or logs out of the application, while `user` is called both of those times, and also is called when Firebase refreshes the user's authentication token.

As a personal guideline, if I need to do an operation when the user's token is refreshed (_for example, update a 3rd party service_) I'll use `user`, if not, I'll default to `authState`.