Angular Material-Start

This Material start* project is a seed for AngularJS Materal applications. The project contains a sample AngularJS application and is preconfigured to install the Angular framework and a bunch of development and testing tools for instant web development gratification.

This sample application is intended to be useful as both a learning tool and a skeleton application for a typical AngularJS Material web app: comprised of a Side navigation area and a content area. You can use it to quickly bootstrap your angular webapp projects and dev environment for these projects.

What is the UX?

Below is a snaphot of the Starter-App with the Users' master-detail view. Also shown is the user experience that will is displayed for smaller device sizes. The responsive layout changes to hide the user list, reveal the menu button. In the User Details view, you may also click the share button to show the Contact <User> bottom sheet view.

This Starter app demonstrates how:

• Angular Material layout and flex options can easily configure HTML containers
• Angular Material components <md-toolbar>, <md-sidenav>, <md-icon> can be quickly used
• Custom controllers can use and show <md-bottomsheet> with HTML templates
• Custom controller can easily, programmatically open & close the SideNav component.
• Responsive breakpoints and $mdMedia are used
• Theming can be altered/configured using $mdThemingProvider
• ARIA features are supported by Angular Material and warnings can be used to improve accessibility.

Tutorials

The repository contains both ES5 and ES6 versions of the application. Traditional development with ES5 standards and solutions are presented here by default. Tutorials are included: step-by-step instructions that clearly demonstrate how the Starter application can be created in minutes.

These tutorials will be presented live, on-stage at ng-conf 2015, Utah.

Developers should checkout the following repository branches for:

• Branch Starter - ES5 Tutorials: for ES5 Tutorial steps & development process.
• Branch Starter - ES6 Tutorials: for ES6 Tutorial steps & development process.
• Branch Starter - ES6: for example implementation of Angular Material 1.x (and Angular 1.x) within an ES6 application.

The README for the ES6 branches will provide all details showing how easy, more simplifed, and more manageable it is to develop ES6 applications with Angular Material 1.x.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

You will need git to clone the material-start repository. You can get git from http://git-scm.com/.

We also use a number of node.js tools to initialize and test material-start. You must have node.js and its package manager (npm) installed. You can get them from http://nodejs.org/.

Clone material-start

To get you started you can simply clone master branch from the Material-Start repository and install the dependencies:

NOTE: The master branch contains the traditional, ES5 implementation familiar to Angular developers.

Clone the material-start repository using git:

git clone https://github.com/angular/material-start.git
cd material-start

If you just want to start a new project without the material-start commit history then you can do:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/angular/material-start.git <your-project-name>

The depth=1 tells git to only pull down one commit worth of historical data.

Install Dependencies

We have two kinds of dependencies in this project: tools and angular framework code. The tools help us manage and test the application.

• We get the tools we depend upon via npm, the node package manager.
• We get the angular code via bower, a client-side code package manager.

We have preconfigured npm to automatically run bower so we can simply do:

npm install

Behind the scenes this will also call bower install. You should find that you have two new folders in your project.

• node_modules - contains the npm packages for the tools we need
• app/bower_components - contains the angular framework files

Note that the bower_components folder would normally be installed in the root folder but material-start changes this location through the .bowerrc file. Putting it in the app folder makes it easier to serve the files by a webserver.

Directory Layout

app/                    --> all of the source files for the application
  assets/app.css        --> default stylesheet
  src/           --> all app specific modules
     users/              --> package for user features
  index.html            --> app layout file (the main html template file of the app)
karma.conf.js         --> config file for running unit tests with Karma
e2e-tests/            --> end-to-end tests
  protractor-conf.js    --> Protractor config file
  scenarios.js          --> end-to-end scenarios to be run by Protractor

Updating Angular

Previously we recommended that you merge in changes to angular-seed into your own fork of the project. Now that the angular framework library code and tools are acquired through package managers (npm and bower) you can use these tools instead to update the dependencies.

You can update the tool dependencies by running:

npm update

This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the package.json file.

You can update the Angular dependencies by running:

bower update

This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the bower.json file.

Serving the Application Files

While angular is client-side-only technology and it's possible to create angular webapps that don't require a backend server at all, we recommend serving the project files using a local webserver during development to avoid issues with security restrictions (sandbox) in browsers. The sandbox implementation varies between browsers, but quite often prevents things like cookies, xhr, etc to function properly when an html page is opened via file:// scheme instead of http://.

Running the App during Development

The angular-seed project comes preconfigured with a local development webserver. It is a node.js tool called http-server. You can install http-server globally:

sudo npm install -g http-server

Then you can start your own development web server to serve static files from a folder by running:

cd app
http-server -a localhost -p 8000

Alternatively, you can choose to configure your own webserver, such as apache or nginx. Just configure your server to serve the files under the app/ directory.

Contact

For more information on AngularJS please check out http://angularjs.org/ For more information on Angular Material, check out https://material.angularjs.org/