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Implementing Order Statistics API on Tickets Route in Open Event Frontend

Post author:harshitagupta30
Post published:August 31, 2017
Post category:API Event Event Management FOSSASIA GSoC Open Event
Post comments:0 Comments

The order statistics API endpoints are used to display the statistics related to tickets, orders, and sales. It contains the details about the total number of orders, the total number of tickets sold and the amount of the sales. It also gives the detailed information about the pending, expired, placed and completed orders, tickets, and sales.

This article will illustrate how the order statistics can be displayed using the Order Statistics API in Open Event Frontend. The primary end point of Open Event API with which we are concerned with for statistics is

GET /v1/events/{event_identifier}/order-statistics

First, we need to create a model for the order statistics, which will have the fields corresponding to the API, so we proceed with the ember CLI command:

ember g model order-statistics-tickets

Next, we need to define the model according to the requirements. The model needs to extend the base model class. The code for the model looks like this:

import attr from 'ember-data/attr';
import ModelBase from 'open-event-frontend/models/base';

export default ModelBase.extend({
  orders  : attr(),
  tickets : attr(),
  sales   : attr()
});

As we need to display the statistics related to orders, tickets, and sales so we have their respective variables inside the model which will fetch and store the details from the API.

Now, after creating a model, we need to make an API call to get the details. This can be done using the following:

return this.modelFor('events.view').query('orderStatistics', {});

Since the tickets route is nested inside the event.view route so, first we are getting the model for event.view route and then we’re querying order statistics from the model.

The complete code can be seen here.

Now, we need to call the model inside the template file to display the details. To fetch the total orders we can write like this

{{model.orders.total}}

In a similar way, the total sales can be displayed like this.

{{model.sales.total}}

And total tickets can be displayed like this

{{model.tickets.total}}

If we want to fetch other details like the pending sales or completed orders then the only thing we need to replace is the total attribute. In place of total, we can add any other attribute depending on the requirement. The complete code of the template can be seen here.

The UI for the order statistics on the tickets route looks like this.

Fig. 1: The user interface for displaying the statistics

The complete source code can be seen here.

Resources:

Open Event API Docs
Official Ember Data documentation
An article on how to create GET requests in ember in the blog by Adam Sommer

Implementing Pages API in Open Event Frontend

Post author:harshitagupta30
Post published:August 31, 2017
Post category:API Event Management FOSSASIA GSoC Open Event Tutorial
Post comments:0 Comments

The pages endpoints are used to create static pages which such as about page or any other page that doesn’t need to be updated frequently and only a specific content is to be shown. This article will illustrate how the pages can be added or removed from the /admin/content/pages route using the pages API in Open Event Frontend. The primary end point of Open Event API with which we are concerned with for pages is

GET /v1/pages

First, we need to create a model for the pages, which will have the fields corresponding to the API, so we proceed with the ember CLI command:

ember g model page

Next, we need to define the model according to the requirements. The model needs to extend the base model class. The code for the page model looks like this:

import attr from 'ember-data/attr';
import ModelBase from 'open-event-frontend/models/base';

export default ModelBase.extend({
  name        : attr('string'),
  title       : attr('string'),
  url         : attr('string'),
  description : attr('string'),
  language    : attr('string'),
  index       : attr('number', { defaultValue: 0 }),
  place       : attr('string')
});

As the page will have name, title, url which will tell the URL of the page, the language, the description, index and the place of the page where it has to be which can be either a footer or an event.

The complete code for the model can be seen here.

Now, after creating a model, we need to make an API call to get and post the pages created. This can be done using the following:

return this.get('store').findAll('page');

The above line will check the store and find all the pages which have been cached in and if there is no record found then it will make an API call and cache the records in the store so that when called it can return it immediately.

Since in the case of pages we have multiple options like creating a new page, updating a new page, deleting an existing page etc. For creating and updating the page we have a form which has the fields required by the API to create the page. The UI of the form looks like this.

Fig. 1: The user interface of the form used to create the page.

Fig. 2: The user interface of the form used to update and delete the already existing page

The code for the above form can be seen here.

Now, if we click the items which are present in the sidebar on the left, it enables us to edit and update the page by displaying the information stored in the form and then the details be later updated on the server by clicking the Update button. If we want to delete the form we can do so using the delete button which first shows a pop up to confirm whether we actually want to delete it or not. The code for displaying the delete confirmation pop up looks like this.

<button class="ui red button" 
{{action (confirm (t 'Are you sure you would like to delete this page?') (action 'deletePage' data))}}>
{{t 'Delete'}}</button>

The code to delete the page looks like this

deletePage(data) {
    if (!this.get('isCreate')) {
      data.destroyRecord();
      this.set('isFormOpen', false);
    }
  }

In the above piece of code, we’re checking whether the form is in create mode or update mode and if it’s in create mode then we can destroy the record and then close the form.

The UI for the pop up looks like this.

Fig.3: The user interface for delete confirmation pop up

The code for the entire process of page creation to deletion can be checked here

To conclude, this is how we efficiently do the process of page creation, updating and deletion using the Open-Event-Orga pages API ensuring that there is no unnecessary API call to fetch the data and no code duplication.

Resources:

Open Event API Docs
Official Ember Data documentation
An article on how to create GET requests in ember in the blog by Adam Sommer

Implementing Speakers Call API in Open Event Frontend

Post author:harshitagupta30
Post published:August 9, 2017
Post category:API Event Event Management FOSSASIA GSoC Open Event Tutorial
Post comments:0 Comments

This article will illustrate how to display the speakers call details on the call for speakers page in the Open Event Frontend project using the Open Event Orga API. The API endpoints which will be mainly focussing on for fetching the speaker call details are:

GET /v1/speakers-calls/{speakers_call_id}

In the case of Open Event, the speakers are asked to submit their proposal beforehand if they are interested in giving some talk. For the same purpose, we have a section on the event’s website called as Call for Speakers on the event’s public page where the details about the speakers call are present along with the button Submit Proposal which redirects to the link where they can upload the proposal if the speakers call is open. Since the speakers call page is present on the event’s public page so the route which will be concerned with will be public/index route and its subroute public/index/cfs in the application. As the call for speakers details are nested within the events model so we need to first fetch the event and then from there we need to fetch the speaker-calls detail from the model.

The code to fetch the event model looks like this:

model(params) {
return this.store.findRecord('event', params.event_id, { include: 'social-links' });
}

The above model takes care of fetching all the data related to the event but, we can see that speakers call is not included as the parameter. The main reason behind this is the fact that the speakers is not required on each of the public route, rather it is required only for the subroute public/index/cfs route. Let’s see how the code for the speaker-call modal work to fetch the speaker calls detail from the above event model.

model() {
    const eventDetails = this.modelFor('public');
    return RSVP.hash({
      event        : eventDetails,
      speakersCall : eventDetails.get('speakersCall')
    });
}

In the above code, we made the use of this.modelFor(‘public’) to make the use of the event data fetched in the model of the public route, eliminating the separate API call for the getting the event details in the speaker call route. Next, using the ember’s get method we are fetching the speakers call data from the eventDetails and placing it inside the speakersCall JSON object for using it lately to display speakers call details in public/index subroute.

Until now, we have fetched event details and speakers call details in speakers call subroute but we need to display this on the index page of the sub route. So we will pass the model from file cfs.hbs to call-for-speakers.hbs the code for which looks like this:

{{public/call-for-speakers speakersCall=model.speakersCall}}

The trickiest part in implementing the speakers call is to check whether the speakers call is open or closed. The code which checks whether the call for speaker has to be open or closed is:

isOpen: computed('startsAt', 'endsAt', function() {
     return moment().isAfter(this.get('startsAt')) && moment().isBefore(this.get('endsAt'));
})

In the above-computed property isOpen of speakers-call model, we are passing the starting time and the ending time of the speakers call. We are then comparing if the starting time is after the current time and the current time is before the ending time than if both conditions satisfy to be true then the speakers call is open else it will be closed.

Now, we need a template file where we will define how the user interface for call-for-speakers based on the above property, isOpen. The code for displaying UI based on its open or closed status is

  {{#if speakersCall.isOpen}}
    <a class="ui basic green label">{{t 'Open'}} </a>
    <div class="sub header">
      {{t 'Call for Speakers Open until'}} {{moment-format speakersCall.endsAt 'ddd, MMM DD HH:mm A'}}
    </div>
  {{else}}
    <a class="ui basic red label">{{t 'Closed'}}</a>
  {{/if}}

In the above code, we are checking is the speakersCall is open then we show a label open and display the date until which speakers call is opened using the moment helper in the format “ddd, MMM DD HH:mm A” else we show a label closed. The UI for the above code looks like this.

Fig. 1: The heading of speakers call page when the call for speakers is open

The complete UI of the page looks like this.

Fig. 2: The user interface for the speakers call page

The entire code for implementing the speakers call API can be seen here.

To conclude, this is how we efficiently fetched the speakers call details using the Open-Event-Orga speakers call API, ensuring that there is no unnecessary API call to fetch the data.

Resources:

Open Event API Docs
Official Ember Data documentation
Lodash documentation
An article on how to create GET requests in ember in the blog by asommer70

Implementing Copyright API in Open Event Frontend

Post author:harshitagupta30
Post published:July 29, 2017
Post category:API Event Event Management FOSSASIA GSoC Open Event
Post comments:0 Comments

This article illustrates how the copyright details have been displayed in the Open Event Frontend project using the Open Event Orga API. The API endpoints which will be mainly focussing on for fetching the copyright details are:

GET /v1/event-copyright/{event_copyright_id}

The events have copyrights which give the creator of the event exclusive rights for its use and distribution. In the Open Event application, the copyright details can be seen on the public event page. The public event page contains the events details like description, venue, tickets, speakers, sponsors along with the copyright details and these details are present on the public/index route in the application. Apart from index route, we have multiple subroutes to display the detailed information of speakers, sessions and schedule. The one thing which remains common to all the public event pages is the copyright information. Most of the time the copyright details are event specific so they are nested within the event model so if we want to display them we need to fetch the event model first.

The code to fetch the event model looks like this:

model(params) {
return this.store.findRecord('event', params.event_id, { include: 'social-links, event-copyright' });
}

If we try to comprehend the code then we can see that ‘event-copyright’ details are included inside the model. The reason behind this is the fact that the copyright information is not specific to a particular route and is displayed on the all the public event pages. After fetching the copyright details the next step we need to perform is to display them on the event’s index page.

The code to display the copyright details looks like this:

{{#if model.event.copyright}}
  <div class="copyright">
    {{public/copyright-item copyright=model.event.copyright}}
  </div>
{{/if}}

In the first line, we have an if conditional statement which verifies whether the copyright data exists or not. If the data does not exist then the copyright class will not be visible on the page and if the model is not empty then it will be displayed with the help of model.event.copyright which is responsible for displaying the fetched data on the page.

If we see in the third line, we have called an another template ‘copyright-item’ which is responsible for how the data will look or in simpler words the UI of the copyright data.

The code which determines UI of the copyright details looks like this:

<img src="{{copyright.logoUrl}}" class="copyright-image" alt="{{copyright.licence}}">
<br>
<div class='copyright text'>
  <p>
    {{t 'This event is licenced under'}} <a href="{{copyright.licenceUrl}}"> {{copyright.licence}} </a>.
  </p>
</div>

In the first line of code, we are providing the src to the image which is stored in ‘logoUrl’ variable of the copyright object. If we hover the image we can see the copyright license which is stored in the ‘license’ variable. Then finally we have copyright license’s URL which is stored under ‘licenceUrl’ variable of copyright object. The resulting UI from the above source code looks like this :

Fig. 1: The user interface of the copyright details

Now we need to test whether the copyright details are completely displayed or not. To test it we created an integration test in which we created a sample ember object to check the correctness of the code. The sample ember object for copyright details looks like this:

To view the complete code regarding the copyright API integration check this.

const copyright = EmberObject.create({
  holder     : 'Creative Commons',
  holderUrl  : 'https://creativecommons.org',
  licence    : 'Public Domain Dedication (CC0)',
  licenceUrl : 'https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/',
  year       : 2007,
  logoUrl    : 'http://image.ibb.co/gt7q7v/pdd.png'
});

To conclude, this is how we integrated copyright information inside the Open Event Frontend project using the Open Event Orga API efficiently.

Resources:

Open Event API Docs
Official Ember Data documentation
Lodash documentation
An article on how to create GET requests in ember in the blog by asommer70

Image Source : https://libsource.com/understanding-creative-commons-licensing/

Ember Mixins used in Open Event Frontend

Post author:harshitagupta30
Post published:July 29, 2017
Post category:Event Management FOSSASIA GSoC Open Event
Post comments:0 Comments

This post will illustrate how ember mixins are used in the Open Event Frontend to avoid code duplication and to keep it clean to reduce code complexity.

The Open Event application needs forms at several places like at the time of login, for the creation of the event, taking the details of the user, creating discount codes for tickets etc. Every form performs similar actions which taking input and finally storing it in the database. In this process, a set of things keep executing in the background such as continuous form validation which means checking inputted values to ensure they are correctly matched with their type as provided in the validation rules, popping out an error message in case of wrong inputted values, etc. which is common to all the forms. The only thing which changes is the set of validation rules which are unique for every form. So let’s see how we solved this issue using Ember Mixins.

While writing the code, we often run into the situation where we need to use the similar behaviour in different parts of the project. We always try not to duplicate the code and keep finding the ways to DRY ( Don’t Repeat Yourself ) up the code. In Ember, we can share the code in the different parts of the project using Ember.Mixins.

While creating the forms, we mostly have differing templates but the component logic remains same. So we created a mixin form.js which contains all the properties which are common to all the forms. The code mixin contains can be reused throughout different parts of the application and is not a concern of any one route, controller, component, etc. The mixins don’t get instantiated until we pass them into some object, and they get created in the order of which they’re passed in. The code for form.js mixin looks like this.

export default Mixin.create({
  autoScrollToErrors : true,
  autoScrollSpeed    : 200,

  getForm() {
    return this.get('$form');
  },

  onValid(callback) {
    this.getForm().form('validate form');
    if (this.getForm().form('is valid')) {
      callback();
    }
  },
  
  didRender() {
      const $popUps = this.$('.has.popup');
      if ($popUps) {
        $popUps.popup({
          hoverable: true
        });
      }
      let $form = this.$('.ui.form');
      if ($form) {
        $form = $form.first();
        if (this.get('getValidationRules') && $form) {
          $form.form(merge(defaultFormRules, this.getValidationRules()));
        }
      },
  didInsertElement() {
    $.fn.form.settings.rules.date = (value, format = FORM_DATE_FORMAT) => {
      if (value && value.length > 0 && format) {
        return moment(value, format).isValid();
      }
      return true;
    };
  }

The complete code can be seen here.

Let’s start understanding the above code. In the first line, we created a mixin via Ember.Mixin.create() method. We have then specified the property ‘autoScrollToErrors’ to true so in case if there is some error, the form will automatically scroll to the error. The property ‘autoScrollSpeed’ specifies the speed with which the form will auto scroll to show the error. ‘getForm()’ method helps in getting the object which will be passed to the mixin. In ‘onValid()’ method we’re validating the form and passing the callbacks if it is correctly validated. We then have ‘didRender()’ method which renders the popups, checkboxes and form rules. The popups help in showing the errors on the form. In this method, we’re fetching the validation rules which are written in child/subclasses which are using this mixin to create the form. The validation rules help in validating the form and tells if the value inputted is correct or not. In most of the forms, we have a field which asks for some specific date. The piece of code under ‘didInsertElement()’ helps in validating the date and returns true if it is correct. We have ‘willDestroyElement()’ method which destroys the popup if the window is changed/refreshed.

Let see the use case of the above form mixin. At the time of login, we see a form which asks for the user’s credentials to validate if the user is already registered or not. To create that login form we use form mixin. The code for login-form.js looks like this.

export default Component.extend(FormMixin, {
getValidationRules() {
  
fields : {
        identification: {
          identifier : 'email',
          rules      : [
            {
              type   : 'empty',
              prompt : this.l10n.t('Please enter your email ID')
            },
            {
              type   : 'email',
              prompt : this.l10n.t('Please enter a valid email ID')
            }
          ]
        },
        password: {
          identifier : 'password',
          rules      : [
            {
              type   : 'empty',
              prompt : this.l10n.t('Please enter your password')
            }
          ]
        }
      }
   }
});

The complete code can be found here.

We can see that in above code we are creating the form by extending our FormMixin which means that the form will have all the properties which are part of mixin along with the properties which remain unique to this class. Since the validation rules remain unique per form so we’re also providing the rules (easy to comprehend) which will help in validating the fields.

This is how our forms look like after and before applying validation rules.

Fig. 1: Login form before applying validation rules

Fig. 2: Login form after applying validation rules

To sum it up, we can say that mixins are of great use when we want to keep our code DRY or reduce the code duplication. It helps in removing the unnecessary inheritance keeping it short. The code written using mixin is lesser complex and easily understandable.

References:

An article of Mixins vs Extend in Ember by Romina Vargas (https://dockyard.com/blog/2015/11/09/best-practices-extend-or-mixin)
Mixins in Ember.js by Kasper Tidemann (http://www.kaspertidemann.com/mixins-in-ember-js/)

Implementing Sponsors API in Open Event Frontend to Display Sponsors

Post author:harshitagupta30
Post published:July 26, 2017
Post category:Event Management FOSSASIA GSoC Open Event
Post comments:0 Comments

This article will illustrate how the sponsors have been displayed on the public event page in Open Event Frontend using the Open-Event-Orga sponsors API. As we know that the project is an ember application so, it uses Ember data to consume the API. For fetching the sponsors, we would be mainly focusing on the following API endpoint:

GET /v1/events/{event_identifier}/sponsors

In the application we need to display the sponsors is the event’s public page which contains the event details, ticketing information, speaker details etc. along with the list of sponsors so, we will be only concerned with the public/index route in the application. As the sponsors details are nested within the events model so we need to first fetch the event and then from there we need to fetch the sponsors list from the model.

The model to fetch the event details looks like this:

model(params) {
return this.store.findRecord('event', params.event_id, { include: 'social-links' });
}

But we can easily observe that there is no parameter related to sponsor in the above model. The reason behind this is the fact that we want our sponsors to be displayed only on the event’s index route rather than displaying them on all the sub routes under public route. To display the sponsors on the public/index route our modal looks like this:

model() {
    const eventDetails = this._super(...arguments);
    return RSVP.hash({
      event   : eventDetails,
      sponsors: eventDetails.get('sponsors')
   });
}

As we can see in the above code that we have used this._super(…arguments) to fetch the event details from the event’s public route model which contains all the information related to the event thereby eliminating the need of another API call to fetch sponsors. Now using the ember’s get method we are fetching the sponsors from the eventDetails and putting it inside the sponsors JSON object for using it lately to display sponsors in public/index route.

Till now, we’ve fetched and stored the sponsors now our next task is to display the sponsors list on the event’s index page. The code for displaying the sponsors list on the index page is

{{public/sponsor-list sponsors=model.sponsors}}

The sample user interface without for displaying the sponsors looks like this:

Fig. 1: The sample user interface for displaying the sponsors

After replacing the real time data with the sample one, the user interface (UI) for the sponsors looks like this.

Fig. 2: The user interface for sponsors with real time data

The entire code for implementing the sponsors API can be seen here.

To conclude, this is how we efficiently fetched the sponsors list using the Open-Event-Orga sponsors API, ensuring that there is no unnecessary API call to fetch the data.

Resources:

Open Event API Docs
Official Ember Data documentation
Lodash documentation
An article on how to create GET requests in the ember in the blog by asommer7

Using Semantic UI Modals in Open Event Frontend

Post author:harshitagupta30
Post published:July 15, 2017
Post category:Event Management FOSSASIA GSoC Open Event Tutorial
Post comments:0 Comments

Modals in semantic UI are used to display the content on the current view while temporarily blocking the interaction with the main view. In Open Event Frontend application, we’ve a ‘delete’ button which deletes the published event as soon as the button is pressed making all the data clean. Once the event is deleted by the user, it is not possible to restore it again. We encountered that this can create a whole lot of problem if the button is pressed unintentionally. So we thought of solving this by popping up a dialog box on button click with a warning and asking for user’s confirmation to delete the event. To implement the dialog box, we used semantic UI modals which helped in ensuring that the user correctly enters the name of the event in the given space to ensure that s/he wants to delete the event.

Since we want our modal to be customizable yet reusable so that it can be used anywhere in the project so we made it as the component called ‘event-delete-modal’. To do that we first need to start with the template.

The markup for the event-delete-modal looks like this:

<div class="content">
  <form class="ui form" autocomplete="off" {{action (optional formSubmit) on='submit' preventDefault=true}}>
    <div class="field">
      <div class="label">
        {{t 'Please enter the full name of the event to continue'}}
      </div>
      {{input type='text' name='confirm_name' value=confirmName required=true}}
    </div>
  </form>
</div>
<div class="actions">
  <button type="button" class="ui black button" {{action 'close'}}>
    {{t 'Cancel'}}
  </button>
  <button type="submit" class="ui red button" disabled={{isNameDifferent}} {{action deleteEvent}}>
    {{t 'Delete Event'}}
  </button>
</div>

The complete code for the template can be seen here.

The above code for the modal window is very similar to the codes which we write for creating the main window. We can see that the semantic UI collection “form” has also been used here for creating the form where the user can input the name of the event along with delete and cancel buttons. The delete button remains disabled until the time correct name of the event been written by the user to ensure that user really wants to delete the event. To cancel the modal we have used close callback method of semantic UI modal which itself closes it. Since the ‘isNameDifferent’ action is uniquely associated to this particular modal hence it’s been declared in the ‘event-delete-modal.js’ file.

The code for the ‘isNameDifferent’ in ‘event-delete-modal.js’ file looks like this.

export default ModalBase.extend({
  isSmall         : true,
  confirmName     : '',
  isNameDifferent : computed('confirmName', function() {
    return this.get('confirmName').toLowerCase() !== this.get('eventName').toLowerCase();
  })
});

The complete code for the.js file can be seen here.

In the above piece of code, we have isSmall variable to ensure that our modal size is small so it can fit for all screen sizes and we have the implementation isNameDifferent() function. We can also notice that our modal is extending the ‘ModelBase’ class which has all the semantic UI modal settings and the callback methods to perform show, hide, close and open actions along with settings which will help modal to look the way we want it to be.

The modal-base.js class looks like this.

  openObserver: observer('isOpen', function() {
   close() {
     this.set('isOpen', false);
   },
   actions: {
    close() {
      this.close();
    }
  },
  willInitSemantic(settings) {
    const defaultOptions = {
      detachable     : false,
      duration       : testing ? 0 : 200,
      dimmerSettings : {
        dimmerName : `${this.get('elementId')}-modal-dimmer`,
        variation  : 'inverted'
      },
      onHide: () => {
        this.set('isOpen', false);
        if (this.get('onHide')) {
          this.onHide();
        }
      },
      onVisible: () => {
        this.set('isOpen', true);
        this.$('[data-content]').popup({
          inline: true
        });
     }

The complete code for the .js file can be seen here.

In the above code, we can see that at the top we’ve an ‘openObserver’ function where we’re observing the behaviour of the modal and setting the variables according to the behavioural changes. Now, later we’re checking the status of those variables and performing the actions based on their value. For example, to close the modal we have a boolean variable ‘isOpen’ which is set to false now close() action will be called which closes the modal. Similarly, in ‘willInitSemantic(settings)’ function we’re setting the modal’s setting like the effects, length, the details modal will display on popping out etc.
We’re here overriding the semantic UI moda settings like detachable, dimmerSettings, duration etc along with the callback methods like onHide(), onVisible() etc. to get the required results.

Finally, our event-delete-modal will look something like this.

Fig: Modal to delete the event

So to conclude this post, we can easily say that the modals are of great use. They can solve the purpose of displaying some alert or to input some values without interrupting the flow of the main page depending upon the requirements.

Additional Resources:

Blog post about Awesome Ember.js Form Components of Alex Speller: http://alexspeller.com/simple-forms-with-ember/

Step by step guide for Beginners in Web Development for Open Event Frontend

Post author:harshitagupta30
Post published:June 30, 2017
Post category:Event Event Management FOSSASIA GSoC Open Event Tutorial
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Originally the frontend and backend of the Open Event Server project were handled by FLASK with jinja2 being used for rendering templates. As the size of the project grew, it became difficult to keep track of all the modifications made on the frontend side. It also increased the complexity of the code. As a result of this, a new project Open Event Frontend was developed by decoupling the backend and frontend of the Open Event Orga Server. Now the server is being converted fully into functional API and database and the open event frontend project is primarily the frontend for the Open event server API where organisers, speakers and attendees can sign-up and perform various functions.

The Open Event Frontend project is built on JavaScript web application framework, “Ember.js”. To communicate with the server API Ember.js user Ember data which is a data persistence module via the exposed endpoints. Suppose if you’re coming from the Android background, soon after diving into the web development you can relate that the web ecosystem is much larger than the mobile one and for the first timers it can be difficult to adopt with it because of the reason that in web there are multiple ways to perform a task which can be restricted to very few in the case of Android. For web applications, one can find that much more components are involved in setting up the project while in android one can easily start contributing to project soon after compiling it in Android Studio. One thing which is relatable for both the android and web development is that in the case of android one has to deal with the varying screen sizes and compatibility issue while in the web one has to deal with adding support for different browsers and versions which can be really annoying.

Now let’s see how one can start contributing to the Open event frontend project while having no or a little knowledge of web development. In case if you’ve previous knowledge of JavaScript then you can skip the step 1 and move directly to another step which is learning the framework.

(Here all the steps have been explained in reference if you’re switching from Android to Web development.)

Step 1. Learning the Language – JavaScript

Now that when you’ve already put your feet into the web development it’s high time to get acquainted with the JavaScript. Essentially in the case of Ember which is easy to comprehend, you can though start with learning the framework itself but the executables file are written in JavaScript so to write them you must have basic knowledge of the concepts in the language. Understanding of JavaScript will help in letting know where the language ends and where the framework starts. It will also help in better understanding of the framework. In my opinion, the basic knowledge of JavaScript like the scope of variables, functions, looping, conditional statements, modifying array and dictionaries, ‘this’ keyword etc. helps in writing and understanding the .js files easily. Also, sometimes in JavaScript, an error might not be thrown as an exception while compiling but it may evaluate the program to undefined, knowledge of the language will help in debugging the code.

Step 2. Learning the Framework – Ember

Ember is a JavaScript Framework which works on Model-View-Controller(MVC) approach. The Ember is a battery included framework which generates all the boilerplate code including components, routes. Templates etc. required for building an application’s frontend. It is very easy to understand and comprehend. In Ember, we can easily define the data models and relationships and ember will automatically guess the correct API endpoints. Apart from this, the documentation of the ember on its website is very much sufficient to start with. One can easily start developing applications after going through the tutorial mentioned on the ember’s website.

Step 3. Testing

In the case of Android application development to write test we use android libraries like Mockito and Robolectric. Also, testing is a bit more difficult in Android app development because we have to explicitly write the test but it is a lot easier in the case of web development. In the case of Ember, it provides an ease of testing which no other framework and libraries provide. While generating a component or template ember itself generates the test files for them and all we have to do is to change them according to our requirement. Ember generates unit, acceptance and integration tests by making testing easier. So we don’t have to write the test explicitly we only have to modify the test files generated by ember.

Step 4. Styling

In Android we have colors.xml, styles.xml, drawables, gradients, shapes etc. for styling our application but in the case of Web, we have Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for styling our application. Simply using pure CSS make design complicated and difficult to understand, so to make it easier we combine a bunch of design elements with a style file and use Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets (Saas) with mixins to do that which makes creating styles a lot easier and more straightforward. So for styling, our web application one should have the knowledge of HTML as well as CSS.

In conclusion, I can say that learning web development requires learning a few things in parallel which includes learning a language, learning a framework, how to perform testing and different styling skills to make an application beautiful. Due to dynamic nature of the JavaScript and the sheer number of packages and components involved, as opposed to the safe environment that Android Studio provides, it can be sometimes really frustrating. However, once learned the basics, the knowledge and skills can be easily transferred and applied over and over again.