Since Q4 2013, AngularJS is helping me deliver amazing UX in Salesforce 1 mobile and desktop, which was previously achieved using jQuery, Kendo, Dust, Mustache etc. I was very excited and impressed with the way Angular brings discipline to Javascript coding, its pretty easy to hate and curse each other’s Javascript code otherwise, web devs will agree :). It was not only discipline and organisation in code, but also clear separation of concerns i.e. behaviour, markup and model, which made Javascript codebase more maintainable.
Mindset change – “be curious not judgemental”
It requires a decent mindset change to adopt and go in flow with Angular, not only for Visualforce developers, but web developers who are competent with jQuery etc will agree. Once you are open to accept this new Angular-ified approach to web programming, no one will ever look back and be willing to do elem.innerHTML = ‘<some markup>’.
How to get Angular work best with Visualforce ?
Visualforce is a different beast on web, and it requires some more mindset shifts and maturity to get Angular correctly consumed in the same. Web developers might not find it very intuitive to get started with Angular on Visualforce, thus I decided to share my learnings from combining these two beasts in variety of Salesforce projects from desktop, communities and mobile/tablets. I gave a session titled “Angular-ifying your Visualforce pages” in Dreamforce 2015, which covers 3 core approaches to best use Visualforce pages, static resources and IDEs for the same. Following are links to slides, code samples for further reading:
Look forward to hear and learn from your experiences in the same context.
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