My Experience with the Angularjs and First hackathon at Cobone

Overview

Specs:
Frameworks and tools to be used:
Bonus:

One fine day we (TechOps team at cobone) were rudely shaken from our Ramadan muses during the ramadan as we received an email from the head of IT with the subject “PM Application”. Suffice to say we felt like re-enacting the The Social Network film hackathon scene where Mark Zuckerberg messes up with the minds of a couple of dudes in search of an internship; the only interview that combines booze, code, Python, PIX Firewall Emulator and a cheering squad. Our task was not that sick but auspicious enough, perhaps because it was our first hackathon at Cobone. We had to build two applications just to get a hang of new technologies with Angularjs and grails restful API capabilities. We had to develop a project management application with the following specs:

Specs:

User can register
User can login
User can create a Project (supports CRUD)
Against a project user can add tasks (Supports CRUD)
Against a task users can add comments

Frameworks and tools to be used:

Grails
AngularJS
Yeoman
Twitter Bootstrap
GIT
IntelliJ or Atom or Both

Bonus:

Deploy on Heroku
Create an Entity Plugin instead of single Grails project

Since it was my first experience with the Angularjs framework, you guessed right! I was feeling Morpheus in the Matrix, ready to crack a line of code to change the destiny of the world. However, my heavenly enthusiasm was brought back to the world when I learned it was better to flirt with Ugly Betty than butter up Angularjs. The problem was that with Angularjs, the only examples on the internet were written in a different style with no common solutions for common problems. Everyone seems to have a personal style/standard for messing up with Angularjs. For example, we almost went into an amateur mixed martial arts fight on the structure of Angularjs application, especially after realizing the Yeoman default structure is not very impressive.

Due to time constraint and my limited experience with Angularjs, I could not complete frontend (Angularjs) application. But I had to suck up and do something or else I would be lost in a line of code or in an application that seemed to be low on mercy points. What I did was along with the API project, I gave an interface to grails restful app itself.

I began the development of the API Project (I named it grails-restful) and it was all about exploring the grails-restful capabilities. While grails-restful has nothing to do with the Holy Grail I started having some breakthrough and felt like the Hackathon’s big Kahuna. It was a great experience to explore newer version of grails, i.e. 2.4.2, and its amazing support for restful web services. The major challenges I faced during the API Project development were not just confined to missing my bed or desiring coffee coded to perfection. They included: