Many people hate CoffeeScript, and it includes many prominent developers. For them, CoffeeScript doesn’t solve any problems and adds a layer of complexity. Also, the new syntax and getting used to the significance of whitespace has some learning curve. On the other hand, it added much-needed functionality to JavaScript: classes, inheritance, ‘fat arrow’ and so on. At this point, if you are already flinching at the mention of the classes and inheritance, I understand your sentiments.

It’s becoming increasingly common to expose multiple interfaces for application - many applications has apps for iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile in addition to the web interface. Some part of your application functionality may be exposed through other ways like Chrome extension and Windows tile. Depending on nature of your application, you may potentially expose an API. For giving your users a seamless experience of accessing the application from various front-ends, your server needs to have versatile authentication mechanism.

Yeoman, Grunt, Bower toolchain opens up lots of possibility of automating the deployment workflow. I believe one of the factors influencing how often the application gets deployed is the deployment process itself. If deployment process involves series of manual steps, it could be error-prone, and you are likely to deploy less frequently. I firmly believe in making the deployment process as friction-free as possible. In this post, I would scratch the surface and explore a primary deployment scenarios with Yeoman, Grunt, Bower toolchain and Heroku as a cloud platform.

Most likely you already know that AngularJS version 1.2 is deprecating the built-in “end-to-end” or E2E scenario runner with Protractor. This post outlines the steps for setting up Protractor using Yeoman, Grunt and Bower to test an application against multiple targeted browsers in parallel. Before we dive in, here is a quick background if you are new to Protractor or E2E testing. Protractor is an “end-to-end” functional testing framework for AngularJS.

Visual design and UI mock-ups are the effective way for communicating various aspects of the application to end users. However, it falls short when it comes to capturing details of interactions and behaviors of the application. Often, our workflow transitions from visual design to final implementation, with a brief phase of semi-clickable mock-ups. So, real interaction design does not start until the backend development is done and wired up to the front-end.