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KNOCKOUTJS BLUEPRINTS
KNOCKOUTJS BLUEPRINTS

KNOCKOUTJS BLUEPRINTS: Learn how to design and create amazing web applications using KnockoutJS

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KNOCKOUTJS BLUEPRINTS

Chapter 2. Starting Small and Growing in a Modular Way

Another small project will be realized; it will show all the features of KnockoutJS we skipped in the previous chapter, including templates and components, to give you a 360 degree view of this great library.

The topics that will be covered in this chapter include:

  • Exploring templates, components, and all the other binding handlers
  • Making new and useful binding handlers
  • Modularizing what we realize, looking at AMD and the usage of RequireJS

At the end of this chapter you should be able to create a modular application well integrated with external libraries.

Analyzing the project – booking online

The project we are going to realize in this chapter is an online booking site.

Let's imagine you get hired by a company doing online booking, because their site is good, but they know you can make it superlative.

You will work with many other great developers so you will have all the backend functionalities you need; you can also ignore all the problems with the styles, because other people will take care of them; the only thing they need from you is a good, bug-free, web interface.

This domain is new for us, so as the first step, we will go around looking at the website of many competitors, to get an idea about what users can expect from such sites.

This is the list of the competitors we are studying for ideas:

You can see that all of them share...

Modularizing with the component binding handler

In this section, we are going to discuss two different concepts:

  • AMD and RequireJS
  • KnockoutJS binding handler called component

The reason we are going to look at them together is because the best way to use the second one is with the help of the first one.

AMD and RequireJS

Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD) is a way to modularize JavaScript; you can get a good overview of what AMD is and why it is a good idea to use it at this URL: http://requirejs.org/docs/whyamd.html.

Before the use of AMD, all HTML pages were full of script tags to import all the scripts used. You have seen this behavior in the previous chapter, when we put five script tags into each HTML page.

One of the goals of AMD is to improve the separation of JavaScript and HTML; we get this because we put only one script tag in the HTML file, representing the main entrance to our client-side application. Inside this entrance file we put all the logic to load the other components, with...

Writing the Search Form component

Now that we know how to create a component, and we put the base of our Search Form component, we can try to look for the requirements for this component.

A designer will review the View later, so we need to keep it simple to avoid the need for multiple changes later.

From our analysis, we find that our competitors use these components:

  • Autocomplete field for the city
  • Calendar fields for check-in and check-out
  • Selection field for the number of rooms, number of adults and number of children, and age of children

This is a wireframe of what we should build (we got inspired by Trivago):

Writing the Search Form component

We could do everything by ourselves, but the easiest way to realize this component is with the help of a few external plugins; we are already using jQuery, so the most obvious idea is to use jQuery UI to get the Autocomplete Widget, the Date Picker Widget, and maybe even the Button Widget.

Adding the AMD version of jQuery UI to the project

Let's start downloading the current version...

Communicating with other components

We realized the form, and now the customer can search for hotels; clicking on the search button will send a request to the backend, and we will use the result inside other components.

We need a way to enable communication between components without the need for direct referencing each other.

In the next chapter, we will look at the concept of Publish/Subscribe, but now we will go with a simple Event Manager module (following the Mediator design pattern).

When you got the files for the communication with the backend, you download BookingOnline/app/services/eventManager.js.

This module exposes three functions:

  • function on (event name, callback): use it to listen for named event
  • function off (event name, callback): use it to stop current listening for a named event
  • function trigger (event name, parameters): use it to send a message to the listeners

If you check the rest.js module, you will find there a function named getHotelByDestination. At the end of the function...

Adding the Hotel Cards

Now we can develop the Hotel Cards.

As you can see in this wireframe, this component is almost self-contained, so it's normal to realize it with another component.

Adding the Hotel Cards

This component will be much shorter than the previous one because we are not going to put too much effort into it; the main reason is that we get the information to show from the backend, and we just draw it here.

The hardest part here is the HTML and the CSS behind, but we are not so interested in such code in this case.

As the first step, we will create the View Model of this new component, putting this code in BookingOnline/app/components/hotelCard.js:

define(function(require) {
  var ko = require("knockout"),
      template = require("text!./hotelCard.html");
  require("binding-handlers/button");

We will use the button binding handler to improve the style of our Booking buttons:

  function HotelCard(data) {
    ko.utils.extend(this, data);

We will then extend this object with...

Analyzing the project – booking online


The project we are going to realize in this chapter is an online booking site.

Let's imagine you get hired by a company doing online booking, because their site is good, but they know you can make it superlative.

You will work with many other great developers so you will have all the backend functionalities you need; you can also ignore all the problems with the styles, because other people will take care of them; the only thing they need from you is a good, bug-free, web interface.

This domain is new for us, so as the first step, we will go around looking at the website of many competitors, to get an idea about what users can expect from such sites.

This is the list of the competitors we are studying for ideas:

You can see that all of them share the same...

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Description

If you are a JavaScript developer and already know the basics of KnockoutJS and you want to get the most out of it, then this book is for you. This book will help in your transition from a small site to a large web application that is easily maintainable.

Who is this book for?

If you are a JavaScript developer and already know the basics of KnockoutJS and you want to get the most out of it, then this book is for you. This book will help in your transition from a small site to a large web application that is easily maintainable.

What you will learn

  • Create a model of your system and build applications around it
  • Integrate any external library easily
  • Design applications with TDD methodology
  • Use templates to reuse UIs effectively
  • Make a rich, singlepage web application
  • Develop modular, testable applications

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Publication date : Feb 25, 2015
Length: 218 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781783980857
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Product Details

Publication date : Feb 25, 2015
Length: 218 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781783980857
Languages :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

6 Chapters
1. From Idea to Realization Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Starting Small and Growing in a Modular Way Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. SPA for Timesheet Management Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Tracking Expense Using PhoneGap Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Wizard for the Public Administration Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
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Raivo Laanemets May 05, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
KnockoutJS Blueprints is an advanced-level book on the front-end library KnockoutJS (KO). It assumes some familiarity with the library but contains a detailed explanation of KO core concepts in the first chapter. The book focuses on Single Page Applications.The chapters (five total) are presented as a series of projects that make use of different KO features and integrate it with other libraries. The first chapter deals with the main KO features and serves as a quick introduction. The second chapter describes advanced built-in features such as templates and components and also gives examples how to integrate KO with other libraries through custom binding handlers. The third chapter describes a project using DurandalJS, a framework based on KO that adds missing features, such as routing. The fourth chapter builds a PhoneGap application by combining KO with jQuery-Mobile. The fifth shows how to make a Single Page Application crawlable by search engine bots.The book comes with a great amount of example code. The code is thoroughly documented and is written in the OOP style which can be either an advantage or disadvantage depending on the code style preferences of the reader. The code modules are defined using the AMD style with Require.js. Other alternatives, such as CommonJS and Browserify or Webpack are not mentioned although the example projects could be adopted to use CommonJS modules.I recommend the book for front-end/full-stack developers who regularly use KnockoutJS in their work. The book is very practical and contains many useful examples of integrating KO with other front-end libraries in web applications.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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