A week ago, I stumbled by accident on <angular/> via Angular: A Radically Different Way of Building AJAX Apps. I was hooked. Making html ultimate template language by annotating it with few attributes and having two-way data-binding between input forms and objects which can be stored directly in the cloud make a lot of sense for me.
First a bit of history. Back in 2003 I wrote a small tool called wopi (Web Online Poll Interface) to generate on-line polls easily. It was basically html template with few magic fields which would be parsed by perl script to produce php code and database schema for deployment.
I was aware that this approach simply doesn't make sense any more, since browsers can do much more than in 2003, and we have flexible storage systems like CouchDB which doesn't require us having pre-defined data schema.
First I decided to try out hosted service at getangular.com to see if I can create working application in an afternoon. And I could. Then I tried examples which worked on API at getangular.com against angular.js checkout on github, and I was at first surprised that things like ng-entity didn't exists in checkout. However, since storage API is part of hosting offer, that made sense. I will have to implement my own REST storage anyway, and REST API for angular hosting service is documented.
Another interesting thing was that source on github is newer version than one on hosting service, so I had a problem figuring out how to make $resource call which maps objects to REST work and developers on mailing list where very helpful in figuring it out.
Now, I needed to write some kind of REST storage against which I can test my angular controllers which I was writing.
angular-mojolicious is in-memory data store using documented REST API based on mojolicious lightweight perl web framework. In current stage, it provides ability to replicate data from shared storage and provides support for $resource call in angular.
Application which I was writing was simple conference submission app. Basically, one work per submission, but with possibility to group a bunch of works in symposium (single topic which have additional data).
I decided to duplicate symposium work inside each work to make this simple (and store number of work within symposium) and simply copy symposium data from first work to second work within same symposium.
However, I wanted to display all works within symposium and my REST back-end doesn't have any query capability yet (aside from returning all objects). At first, I just added additional javascript object symposium which stores all works within singe symposium in order, mostly so I can display list of works which are part of same symposium.
And again, implementing something visible on screen (list of works within symposium) I created something I can simply wrap into another $resource and store it on server, creating a data view which I needed.
All this duplication of data still seems a bit strange to my relational brain, and pure size of POST request to store symposium data with all works included could be prohibitively expensiveness for hundred of works. However, all data needed for symposium is stored within Work documents, so I could just write server side code which would update Symposium objects directly when Works are updated (something like stored procedures in relational lingo).
In the process, I also learned to pull upstream angular code often, because developers are very active, and any bug you might hitting now might already be fixed in upstream git. I learned it hard way, trying to figure out why my app isn't working while fix was already at angular's github repository. Kudos to fast release cycle.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. [Artur C. Clarke]
In summary, <angular/> is really good way to build web applications, so take a look. angular-mojolicious can get you started. It includes examples from angular cookbook and my simple conference submission application to get you started.
Update: My message about first week of development with angular got quoted on angular wiki testimonial page.