We'll be covering javascript on the client side. This class, we don't install anything! Cool!
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Recap:
- Express is a server library. It is an abstraction for Node. Reference is here: http://nodejs.org/api/
- Jade is a way to make templates, HTML pages that can have strings and other content easily added into them. Refernce is here: http://naltatis.github.com/jade-syntax-docs/
- Mongoose is a database library. It is an abstraction for MongoDB. Reference is here: http://mongoosejs.com/docs/guide.html
Mongoose queries
This:
Person.find({name,"ronald"}, function (err,person) {
console.log(person)
})
is equivalent to:
Person.find({name,"ronald"}).exec(function (err,person) {
console.log(person)
})
The second one is cleaner, and lets you chain stuff other functions inbetween the call to find and exec, like this:
people
.where("name","ronald")
.where('age').gte(25)
.where('interests').in(['movies', 'long walks', 'mongoDB'])
.select('name', 'age', 'interests')
.skip(20)
.limit(10)
.asc('age')
.exec(function (err,people) {
console.log(people)
});
But why do we need exec at the end? According to the mongoose docs
Query.exec
Executes the query passing the results to the optional callback.
Mongoose tries to be smart and holds off on executing most queries. Take for example our previous query where we changed
people
.where("name","ronald")
.where('age').gte(25)
.where('interests').in(['movies', 'long walks', 'mongoDB'])
.select('name', 'age', 'interests')
.skip(20)
.limit(10)
.asc('age')
.exec(function (err,people) {
console.log(people)
});
We could do this same thing by the following pesudocode
people.find({"name", "ronald"}, function(err, ronalds) {
ronalds.find({"age":{"$gt":25}}, function(err, twentyFives) {
twentyFives.find({"interests":{"$in":['movies', 'long walks', 'mongoDB']}}, function (err, sameInterests) {
// do more call back functions in here
...
...
});
});
});The difference between chaining the method calls to people and having a bazillion callbacks is
- tons of callbacks end up looking really ugly. Imagine 7 nested callbacks. WTF is going on?
- Each callback is actually making Mongo execute the query, which makes 7 in total. If you chain, Mongoose attempts to be smart about it and creates ONE super complicated Mongo Query that it executes only once.
There are ton of commands you can chain to a Mongoose query, check out the page here for a description of all of them.
Text Editing
Sublime Text is the best text editor. Get it.
Install on Ubuntu:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-2
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text
Install on OSX:
Download it here
Read about all the cool things you can do with it here
Restart Server Automatically
Install supervisor to automatically restart your server whenever you make a change to your code. No more having to restart your server manually!
Run:
sudo npm install -g supervisor
Then instead of node app.js, you can do:
supervisor app.js
Using Git
Stop using git add . This tells git to add everything. This includes all the temp files that have the ~ extension, any embarrasing photos that you might also have put in the folder, etc.
Run a git status to see the list of modified files. Then git add or git rm the files you want to add or delete, respectively. After that, git commit and git push as usual.
There's also a magical thing called the .gitignore file. It tells git to ignore any files that match names listed within the file. You can add things such as
*.jpg
*~
node_modules
in the .gitignore file and those files will no longer be added when you do a git add
Hyper Text Markup Language is what is used to describe web pages. HTML consists of a set of tags that tell your browser what to render on your page, interspersed with text. A start tag looks like this <tag> and is finished with an end tag </tag>. A start tag can also include attributes, like <a href="http://olinjs.github.com/">Olin.js is awesome</a>. Here href is an attribute with the quoted value http://olinjs.github.com/ and the content Olin.js is awesome. The start tags and the content between them is also called an HTML element.
You can right click any webpage and click "View Source", and you'll see what HTML any page is made of. Pretty neat.
Every webpage follows this structure:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
... some information goes here ...
</head>
<body>
... some content go here ...
</body>
</html>Inbetween head tags are metadata. The <title> tag sets the title of the tab you are viewing. <meta> tags include informations for Search Engine Optimization for showing up on Google. In addition, you can add <script> tags in your header; we'll get to that in your moment.
All of your content goes in your <body>. <div> tags are the most basic tag, and denote a box, any kind of box, that stores other tags and content. To denote text which is more specific, you can use more specific tags:
<p>...</p>is a paragraph of text.<h1>...</h1>is a heading, the font size reflects this. There are headingsh1throughh6.<span>...</span>denotes a span of inline text. You use a span where the text is inside a paragraph and next to other text, and you use a div for entire block of text.<b>...</b>is bold text;<i>...</i>is italic text.<a href="http://google.com/">...</a>makes a hyperlink, which is the foundation of the entire internet.<img src="http://avatars.io/facebook/timcameronryan">is an image. Note that there is no</img>tag, in this case.
You can nest these tags arbitrarily (in most cases):
<body>
<h1>I'm a heading!</h1>
<div>
<p>I'm in a div!<p>
<span> I'm also in a div!</span>
<div><b>Divception!</b></div>
</div>
</body>Great, now you can understand these non-nerdy nerd shirts. See, I told you this class would be useful.
Writing HTML is easy, and everyone has a web browser. There are still some tools which make this even easier. We're going to be doing some tests in this for this class. Open this address:
http://jsfiddle.net/C7S4y/1/
Play around with typing HTML and clicking Run at the top. You'll see the page in the lower right update. If you're unfamiliar with HTML, do through the W3C HTML tutorial and get more comfortable with it. In particular, take a look at lists and tables.
Note that JSFiddle let's you test what HTML looks like, but none of the repsonsibilities of a server (submitting forms, databases, etc.) We'll use this when appropriate.
You know it. Fork this repository, then:
$ git clone https://github.com/______/olinjs-3.git
$ cd olinjs-3
$ express
$ [sudo] npm install
$ node app
Express server listening on port 3000
We can use HTML to create a form. Let's make a very simple app that uses forms to POST data. First, manual labor.
Replace the routes section you have in app.js with this:
app.get('/', routes.index);
app.post('/', routes.index_post);
app.post('/delete/:id', routes.index_delete);
Replace the routes/index.js file with this:
var todos = [];
exports.index = function (req, res) {
res.render('index', {
title: 'Todo list',
todos: todos
});
};
exports.index_post = function (req, res) {
todos.push(req.body.todo);
res.redirect('/');
};
exports.index_delete = function (req, res) {
todos.splice(parseInt(req.params.id), 1);
res.redirect('/');
};
And replace the views/index.jade file with this:
extends layout
block content
h1= title
form(method='post', action='/', id="newform")
| New todo item:
input(name='todo', id="newinput")
button('type='submit')
| Done
ul(id="todolist")
each todo, i in todos
li
div= todo
form(method='post', action='/delete/' + i)
button
| Delete
We'll explain in class briefly what this Jade means and how it relates to HTML. Take a look at http://naltatis.github.com/jade-syntax-docs/ to help follow along in class.
Right click the page and take a look at the source code. It looks like this:
<form method="post" action="/">
New todo item: <input name="todo">
<button type=submit>Done</button>
</form>When you create a form, it looks at all the <input> and <button> elements inside of it. These are the data that get sent whenever you submit the form. When you type in the <input name="todo"> and change it to a TODO list item, that's what gets sent to the server as the value req.body.todo.
The two attributes on <form> are:
method="post"— Forms submit their data as GET or POST. We want to POST this data to the server to add a new entry to the list. POSTed data shows up inreq.body.action="/"— This controls what route handles the data you're submitting. We have anapp.post('/', routes.index_post)that handles our data.
Can you now figure out the way in which the delete button works?
You don't only have to server templates to your users. You can also serve them files from your computer unmodified.
In your application folder exists a folder public/images. In this directory either save or wget this image and name it "david.jpg":
Run your server (node app) and go to http://localhost:3000/images/david.jpg. And that's how you store images! And movies, stylesheets, and scripts! Think of all the cat pictures! You'll build the next Reddit in no time.
JavaScript is a language. Node (server-side) is a "platform". Your browser (client-side) is also a "platform" that runs JavaScript, with a lot of different capabilities.
What is client-side JS good for? Before, we used JavaScript to serve websites. Now we'll use client-side JS to add interactivity to a page. You used Jade in the last lesson to make templates that display content, forms, etc. After a user gets your template, though, they can't do much until they submit a form or go to a new page. With client-side JS, we can make your website much more useful and powerful.
One important caveat: client-side code knows nothing about your server. For all it cares you could be running Python, Ruby, ALGOL or on a Commodore 64. So when you write JavaScript in Node.js, you can't run the same functions in your web browser. We'll explain later how to make them communicate with each other.
Go to http://jsfiddle.net/yqU6K/. We're going to open up the developer console.
- Chrome: Control-Shift-J/Command-Option-J
- Firefox: get Chrome. (I mean, Control-Shift-K/Command-Option-K)
You should see a line which reads Hello Olin.js! If you don't, refresh the page.
As you can see in the "JavaScript" panel on the page, console.log works the same as in Node.js! (This one's a freebie.) Try changing console.log to something more exciting:
alert('Come on down to Pete\'s Pizza Shop for Sweet Pizza Beats');
Then click "Run" at the top of the page. Cool, you made your first Popup ad!
Go to http://jsfiddle.net/yqU6K/3/. We're going to learn jQuery.
jQuery is a way to manipulate webpages. It's all JavaScript, but it's very terse—see if you can keep up. On your webpage, go to the JavaScript panel and type in the following:
$('p').hide()Then click "Run". Once you get it, replace that code with:
$('p').css('background', 'blue')And click "Run". Next, try:
$('p').css('color', 'red').text("I'm sick of typing $()!")Don't worry, we'll be typing this a lot! jQuery is a fun way to mix and mash up HTML that a user is viewing. jQuery is nearly universal, and a large, large percentage of the top 100 websites use it. The way to do this manually in (client-side) JavaScript is extremely tedious, so we're going to be willfully ignorant of that.
$ is very powerful. It can also add elements on to your page. Run the following script:
$('body').append('<img src="http://i.minus.com/iFxelkyarGr5D.gif">');
Now try the following script:
$('*').css('background-image', 'url(http://omfgdogs.com/omfgdogs.gif)');
Oh dear god.
$('button').on('click', function () {
alert('button click!')
})
Also, elements can have ids. IDs are referenced by # then the id name.
$('#first').css('background', 'red');
To embed JavaScript into your page, we first need to create a script.
In your layout.jade, you will want to make your head look like the following:
head
title= title
link(rel='stylesheet', href='/stylesheets/style.css')
script(src='http://code.jquery.com/jquery.js')
script(src='/javascripts/todo.js')
Create a new file in your public/javascripts/ directory called todo.js. Save this as the contents of it:
$(function () {
$('body').html('<h1><marquee>WHEEE</marquee></h1>')
});Restart your server (or if you're using supervisor, it will be done already). Note the wrapper $(function () { ... }) around the entire script...
Ajax refers to communicating between a web page and a server using JavaScript. After your page is loaded, JavaScript takes over the role of making HTTP requests in order to add interactivity to the page.
From your console, run:
$.post("/", {todo: 'hi'});
Refresh the page. We did the action of adding a TODO list item without submitting a form! Now let's be cever.
Replace your todo.js with:
$(function () {
$('#newform').on('submit', function () {
$.post("/", $('#newform').serialize());
return false;
})
})
Try typing in a todo item and hit enter. It doesn't do anything; this is thanks to the return false in our event handler. However, refresh the page, and it's there.
Since this isn't useful to the user, let's paste in this at last:
$(function () {
$('#newform').on('submit', function () {
$.post("/", $('#newform').serialize());
var li = $('<li>' + $('#newinput').val() + '</li>')
$('#todolist').append(li);
return false;
})
})
Hint, to create a form:
var li = $('<li>' + $('#newinput').val() + '</li>')
$('#todolist').append(li);
var form = $('<form method="post" action="/delete/'" + $('#newform li').length + '"><button>Submit</button></form>')
$(li).append(form);
form.on('submit', function () {
// Can you make the delete button do the same thing?
})