What is a Single Page Application?
What is a Single Page Application?
Angular, ...
Like many others, Angular is a Javascript framework used for creating front-end applications. Front-end as in, there is no "database" storing any information.
Many other known Javascript-frameworks include:
- React
- Vue (in which this course is built)
- And many more
Single Page Application
Single Page applications consist like mentioned in the name; of only "one" real page.
When building an application in for example pure HTML or Laravel, ... this consists of many "pages";
- index.html
- contact.html
- ...
Whereas in an Angular-app (or in any other SPA), you have 1 page where different components are loaded depending on the current route (url) you are visiting.
Templating
In the course PHP you saw "Blade" as a method to create dynamic web pages that could contain dynamic content based on the location, logged in user, etc...
In Angular we'll see a similar way of constructing these HTML-pages based on components .
Need for an API
Normally, the workings of an API are rather clear by now. You could write an Angular application that works perfectly fine without any connection to a Database or API but you would be limited to only storing data in the current browser-session. Perfectly fine for a calculator-application for example. But not for most other purposes.
Whereas in .NET, Laravel, ... you can connect directly to an SQL-based database, in Angular this is only possible through an API (some other possibilities exist but will not be covered in this course). You also need to keep in mind that all your code is public! So never store any valuable information in your code like you would've done in PHP!
For the continuation of this course we'll use JSON-server, that mimics the workings of most basic API's.
Basic Interaction
Video
This video explains a bit the history of Angular and only takes about 15min. Introduction of Angular