Build a simple Angular 4 message publisher

Introduction

The differences between Angular 1, Angular 2 and Angular 4

AngularJS/Angular 1 is a very popular framework which is based on MVC model, and it was released in October, 2010.
Angular 2, also called Angular, is based on component and is completely different from Angular 1 , which was released in September 2016.
Angular 4 is simply an update of Angular 2, which is released in March, 2017.

Note that Angular 3 was skipped due to the version number conflicts.

Installation

Prerequisites

1. Install TypeScript:

npm install -g typescript

2. Install code editor: vscode, sublime, intellij.

3. Use Google chrome and development tool to debug.

Install Angular CLI by command line

Angular CLI is a very useful tool which contains a brunch of commands to work with Angular 4. In order to install Angular CLI, the version of Node should be higher or equal to 6.9.0, and NPM need to higher or equal to 3.

npm install -g @angular/cli

Create a new Project

ng new loklak-message-publisher
cd loklak-message-publisher
ng serve

The command will launch web browser automatically in localhost:4200 to run the application. It will detect any change in files. Of course you can change the default port to others.
The basic project structure is like this:

package.json: standard node configuration file, which including the name, version and dependency of the configuration.

tsconfig.json: configuration file for TypeScript compiler.

typings.json: another configuration file for typescript, mainly used for type checking.

app folder contains the main ts file, boot.ts and app.component.ts.

 

Next we will show how to build a simple message publisher. The final application looks like this, we can post new tweets in the timeline, and remove any tweet by clicking ‘x’ button:

  • The first step in to create new elements in app.component.html file.

The HTML file look quite simple, we save the file and switch to browser, the application is like this:

A very simple interface! In next step we need to add some style for the elements. Edit the app.component.css file:

.block {
   width: 800px;
   border: 1px solid #E8F5FD;
   border-bottom: 0px;
   text-align: center;
   margin: 0 auto;
   padding: 50px;
   font-family: monospace;
   background-color: #F5F8FA;
   border-radius: 5px;
}

h1 {
   text-align: center;
   color: #0084B4;
   margin-top: 0px;
}

.post {
   width: 600px;
   height: 180px;
   text-align: center;
   margin: 0 auto;
   background-color: #E8F5FD;
   border-radius: 5px;
}

.addstory {
   width: 80%;
   height: 100px;
   font-size: 15px;
   margin-top: 20px;
   resize: none;
   -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
   -moz-border-radius: 5px;
   border-radius: 5px;
   border-color: #fff;
   outline: none;
}

.post button {
   height: 30px;
   width: 75px;
   margin-top: 5px;
   position: relative;
   left: 200px;
   background-color: #008CBA;
   border: none;
   color: white;
   display: inline-block;
   border-radius: 6px;
   outline: none;
}

.post button:active {
   border: 0.2em solid #fff;
   opacity: 0.6;
}

.stream-container {
   width: 600px;
   border-bottom: 1px solid #E8F5FD;
   background-color: white;
   padding: 10px 0px;
   margin: 0 auto;
   border-radius: 5px;
}

.tweet {
   border: 1px solid;
   border-color: #E8F5FD;
   border-radius: 3px;
}

p {
   text-align: left;
   text-indent: 25px;
   display: inline-block;
   width: 500px;
}

span {
   display: inline-block;
   width: 30px;
   height: 30px;
   font-size: 30px;
   cursor: pointer;
   -webkit-text-fill-color: #0084B4;
}

The app is almost finished, so excited! Now we want to add some default tweets that will be shown up in our application.
Let’s open the app.component.ts file, add an array in class AppComponent.

Then in the app.component.html file, we add ngFor to instantiates a tweets in the page.

After we finished this step, all the tweets are displayed in our application. Now we have to implement ‘tweet’ button and delete button. We define addTweet and removeTweet functions in app.component.ts file.

For the addTweet function, we need to modify html to define the behavior of textarea and tweet button:

For removeTweet function, we add id for each tweet we posted, and combine delete span with removeTweet function, which pass the id of tweet.

Conclusion

There are two things about Angular 4 we can learn from this tutorial:

  1. How to bind functions or variables to DOM elements, e.g. click function, ngModel.
  2. How to use the directives such as *ngFor to instantiate template.

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