Learn Clojure, Microsoft and Svelte

JavaScript community has been shaken recently by a release of Svelte 3 and for a good reason - it's a completely different approach than React or Vue. To quote the docs:

"[Svelte](https://svelte.dev/) is a radical new approach to building user interfaces. Whereas traditional frameworks like React and Vue do the bulk of their work in the browser, Svelte shifts that work into a compile step that happens when you build your app."

**The best part?** If you have 26 spare minutes you can learn the basics of Svelte 3 and start building your own apps with it!

Enjoy!



The magical disappearing UI framework

 - The web's JavaScript bloat crisis, solved. Svelte turns your templates into tiny, framework-less vanilla JavaScript.
 - Simple and familiar. Build apps out of composable, easy-to-write blocks using languages you already know.
 - Super fast, rock solid. Compile-time static analysis ensures the browser does no more work than it needs to.

svelte

Up and running with Svelte 3

Creating forms is one of the simplest and most complicated things at the same time. A basic form consists of many different things happening, we have to retain the value, we have to keep watch of validation and we have to show error messages when something is invalid, this is on both the fields and on the entire form itself if we send a request off to the backend service.

So we're going to create a form using just the normal svelte features. Then we'll look into creating a form using the svelte forms lib. 

Create forms in Svelte with Svelte Forms Lib

Microsoft Windows is a group of several graphical operating system families, all of which are developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry.

microsoft

For a production Windows server it makes sense to run NodeJS applications as a Windows service.  This way they can be automatically restarted if the server is rebooted.

It also makes it easier to use monitoring tools like datadog to detect if there are issues with the service which is critical for production systems.

Install a Node.js Application as a Windows Service

Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.

express

To replicate your production application its helpful when developing a local NodeJS Express application is running under SSL. 

There are some web technologies which do not play nicely with standard http and its likely to become more common e.g. Web Push Notifications.

This lesson will show you how to create a local SSL certificate for localhost and then convert it into a format that will work with Express.  It will also show you how to make sure that Chrome will trust it.

This lesson is for Windows as it uses a powershell command, as well as the Microsoft Management Console (MMC)
 

Create Local SSL Certificates for an Express App on Windows

In this lesson you will learn how to attach Event Handlers to buttons and input fields. Event handlers normally follows the `on:[event]` format. If you are making use of two way binding you should use `bind:` instead, for example an input field could use bind:value.

Use Event Handlers in Svelte 2

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

We'll use Lumo, a cross-platform standalone ClojureScript compiler and Node.js environment, to create Hello as a command-line application. 

In this lesson, I’ll show you how to install Lumo through NPM, invoke a function in ClojureScript, and use the println function from the core library.

Compile and Run a ClojureScript Command-line App on Node.js with Lumo

Flutter allows you to build beautiful native apps on iOS and Android from a single codebase.

flutter

We will setup our first command-line Dart application. We will use the Chocolatey package manager to install the SDK and write our first  program. This will form the basis for future lessons.

Get Chocolatey → https://chocolatey.org/docs/installation

Get the gist of commands → https://gist.github.com/creativebracket/128dafcbbfdc1d6946231a931f95cb1b

Setup your first Dart project on Windows

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

Svelte is a new approach to building user interfaces. 

Instead of doing the vast majority of work at the runtime as other frameworks do, Svelte shifts that work into the _compile_ step which happens when you build your app. As such, you're shipping heavily optimized code to your users.

In this quick lesson we are going to learn how to create a brand new project with Svelte 3 from scratch.

Create a new project with Svelte 3

In most Web applications we want to be able to render different HTML markup depending on values passed in from JavaScript code.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to render JavaScript variable in HTML markup when using Svelte 3.

Add data to HTML markup using Svelte 3

In Svelte 3, the same as in regular HTML we can add CSS styles to a component and this is what we're going to learn in this lesson.

Important note - styles are _scoped to the component_ which means that if we style a `h1` tag in component A, it won't automatically affect `h1` tags in component B.

Add styles to Svelte 3 component

It's highly unlikely that we'd like to have an entire app in a single file. Instead, what we'd like to do is to spread our code across multiple components and render them in one another.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to create a `<Surname />` Svelte 3 component which we're going to use in our main `App.svelte` file to display a user's surname.

Create a new Svelte 3 component to render it inside of another component

One of the key advantages of having a component system is the ability to render the component differently based on what kind of properties (shortened to 'props' in Svelte) were passed in to the component.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to declare properties inside of a Svelte component and how to pass in data to be rendered inside of a `<UserInfo />` component. We're also going to learn how to use default props which are used if a value for a property was not passed in.

Declare and pass in properties to a Svelte 3 component

Svelte automatically updates the DOM when your component's state changes. Often, some parts of a component's state need to be computed from other parts. This is where _reactive declarations_ come in.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to use reactive declarations to re-compute (and render) square of a counter value in a simple counter example whenever user clicks on a button.

Use reactive declarations to compute component state in Svelte 3

Quite often we need to be able to loop over and render a list of data that (for example) is returned from the backend. 

In this lesson we are going to learn how to use `each` block from Svelte to iterate over a list of data and render a list of European cities. We're also going to learn how to get the current `index` while iterating over a list, as well as how to destructure a currently iterated over element of the array.

Loop over and render a list of data using an `each` block in Svelte 3

The whole magic of webapps is that users can interact with our code via various DOM events and Svelte is no exception in that regard.

In this quick lesson we're going to learn how to use DOM events in Svelte 3 as well as how to use event _modifiers_ to alter DOM event behaviour (such as `once` and `preventDefault`)

Use DOM events and event modifiers in Svelte 3

Every Svelte component has a lifecycle that starts when it is created, and ends when it is destroyed. There are a handful of functions that allow you to run code at key moments during that lifecycle.

The one you'll use most frequently is `onMount`, which runs after the component is first rendered to the DOM. 

In this lesson we're going to learn how to use `onMount` to fetch and render data from Star Wars API.

Use an onMount lifecycle method to fetch and render data in Svelte 3

Not all application state belongs inside your application's component hierarchy. Sometimes, you'll have values that need to be accessed by multiple unrelated components, or by a regular JavaScript module.

In Svelte, we do this with _stores_. In this lesson we're going to learn how to create a `writable` store and how to use it to allow `Incrementer` and `Decrementer` components modify the value of the store

Use Svelte 3 stores to share data between multiple unrelated components

Sometimes we don't want to have a complicated `update` function to change a value of our store. We know exactly what we want to change the value to - we can just use the `store.set` function to do that.

In this lesson we're going to learn how to set a value to a Svelte 3 store by using the `store.set` function to set the value of a counter without having to increment/decrement it one by one.

Set a value to a Svelte 3 store

It's important to avoid memory leaks, and Svelte 3 is no exception. When we're using the `subscribe` method from Svelte store in a component, it's important to clean ofter ourselves (especially if we're going to instantiate and destroy this component many times over).

In this lesson we're going to learn how to use `unsubscribe` to stop subscribing to the store change in a component's `onDestroy` call, as well how to use auto-subscriptions to refer to the store value and let Svelte take care of cleaning after us to avoid memory leaks.

Use auto-subscriptions in Svelte 3 to avoid memory leaks when using Stores

If our app needs to display values that are dynamically changing, it's better to animate that to deliver a more engaging user experience.

In this lesson we're going to learn how to use a `tweened` value to dynamically update the value of a progress bar in Svelte 3.