Problem

In Angular, you may have experienced code such as the following not behaving as expected with setTimeout:

$scope.name = "Alex";
setTimeout(function(){
  $scope.name = "John";
}, 3000);

//$scope.name remains "Alex" after 3 seconds

When setTimeout runs code, it actually evaluates code in another thread outside of the Angular context. Hence, our scope is not updated. Here are two ways to fix this issue:

Solutions

$timeout is an Angular resource that can replace setTimeout and run code in the Angular context. Note: You have to dependency inject $timeout to use it. Usage:

$scope.name = "Alex";
$timeout(function(){
  $scope.name = "John";
}, 3000);

//$scope.name changes to "John" after 3 seconds

$apply is another Angular resource you use to tell Angular the code is in Angular context, so watch for changes and digest please! Usage:

$scope.name = "Alex";
setTimeout(function(){
  $scope.$apply(function(){
    $scope.name = "John";
  );
}, 3000);

//$scope.name changes to "John" after 3 seconds

Finally, please note that resource is used broadly, as in something that came with Angular.

Hopefully that solved your problems with setTimeout! Comment if there’s any comments or questions!

Problem

When you start out with code like this:

myApp.controller('mainController', function($scope, $log) {
    console.log($scope);
});

Minifiers end up with something like this:

myApp.controller("mainController",function(o){console.log(o)});

Since the minified version renamed the $scope variable, you can no longer dependency inject $scope.

Inside the console, you see an error like this:

Solution

If you refactor the initial code to:

myApp.controller('mainController', ['$scope', '$log', function($scope, $log) {
    console.log($scope);
    console.log($log);
}]);

The minification turns out like:

myApp.controller("mainController",["$scope","$log",function(o,l){console.log(o),console.log(l)}]);

As you can imagine, o is substituted to $scope. The replacement is determined by order in the array.

Keep in mind that usually dependency injection in Angular is order agnostic, however when using this method, the order matters.

Solution #2

Alternatively:

    function mainController($scope, $log) {...}
    mainController.$inject = ['$scope', '$log'];
    myApp.controller('mainController', mainController);

Other notes:

AngularJS docs -> http://docs.angularjs.org/tutorial/step_05 . Scroll down to A Note on Minification.

Also alternatively, the ng-annotate library can be installed and run manually/automatically converting your original code to work with minification.

In the readme, there are automation tools support for grunt, gulp, rails, and a whole lot more.

For the gulp config files, its as simple as adding:

var ngAnnotate = require('gulp-ng-annotate'); //don't forget to npm install this!'
..//somewhere in a sample task definition

gulp.task('buildJSProduction', function () {
    return gulp.src(['./browser/js/app.js', './browser/js/**/*.js'])
        .pipe(concat('main.js'))
        .pipe(babel())              //ES6 compatability
        .pipe(ngAnnotate())         //allows for minification while preserving dependency injection variable names
        .pipe(uglify())             //we're using ngAnnotate to support minification :)
        .pipe(gulp.dest('./public'));
});

Overview

What is Node.js?

As per the website, Node.js is a platform based on Chrome’s Javascript runtime for building fast , scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non blocking I/O model making it perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that runs across distributed devices. It was written in C++ and can work with C/C++ Libraries.

Node.js has many built in modules, and may be expanded with Express.js for more advanced web applications. Some modules need to be imported by “var x = require(‘X’)”. Node.js is the N in MEAN stack for MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node.

Commonly used node modules

Helpers

fs - require(‘fs’) - provides file I/O

os - require(‘os’) - provides info about hardware + os

path - require(‘path’) - path related helper

dns - require(‘dns’) - resolves ip/dns related records

process - global - provides info about the node process

timers - global - allows setTimeout etc

Encode / Decode

crypto - require(‘crypto’) - hashing stuff

query-string - require(‘query-string’) - parse, encode, stringify URL query strings

url - require(‘url’) - url parser

Server

http- require(‘http’) - built in simple http server (check out https)

net - require(‘net’) - server for streams

event - require(‘events’).EventEmitter - a server side event emitter

cluster - require(‘cluster’) - allows Node to use multi-cores - unstable

Debugging / Testing

util - require(‘util’) - debugging

assert - require(‘assert’) - unit testing

console - global - console.log prints output, console.time / console.timeEnd is helpful

debugger - global - debugger

Other

zlib - require(‘zlib’) - zipping streams

Node Classes

1. Buffer
2. Streams