The $httpBackend service is definitely one of my top 10 AngularJS features. It makes TDD incredibly easy, especially if you're testing directives as a whole.

This post originally appeared on strongloop.com. StrongLoop provides tools and services for companies developing APIs in Node. Learn more...

In the first two articles in this series, you built a

This post originally appeared on strongloop.com. StrongLoop provides tools and services for companies developing APIs in Node. Learn more...

This post originally appeared on strongloop.com. StrongLoop provides tools and services for companies developing APIs in Node. Learn more...

Strict unit tests are an interesting subject. They're simple, elegant, and do

This post originally appeared on strongloop.com. StrongLoop provides tools and services for companies developing APIs in Node. Learn more...

Hating "callback hell" is a favorite pastime for many JavaScript bloggers and open source devs.

People have often asked me about my biggest pain points with AngularJS.

HTTP interceptors are an impressive AngularJS feature that doesn't get nearly enough press. Interceptors define custom transformations for HTTP requests and responses at the application level.

Recently, I've been looking into StrongLoop's LoopBack framework. LoopBack generates Express REST APIs by asking you a few simple questions at the command line. LoopBack lets you swap out different storage layers. For each model you define, you can choose to store it in MongoDB, Oracle, MySQL, or Microsoft SQL Server (or even in memory). Say you decide to store your users in MongoDB but your user's gift cards in MySQL (for transactions). Even if you started writing your code with gift cards stored in MongoDB, LoopBack's database abstraction layer makes switching a one-liner. Furthermore, LoopBack has SDKs for generating REST API clients in AngularJS, Android, and iOS. In short, LoopBack is a powerful tool for generating REST APIs that you can extend to scaffold client-side code.

I have a couple important announcements to make. First, as you might have

You hear a lot about data binding in AngularJS, and with good reason: its at the heart of everything you do with Angular. I've mentioned data binding more than a few times in my guides to directives and filters, but I haven't quite explained the internals of how data binding work. To novices, it seems like straight sorcery, but, in reality, data binding is fundamentally very simple.

My directives post seems to have gone over well. I've received emails and comments from readers expressing how much it helped them, so I figured I'd write a post about one of the simultaneously oldest, most useful, and most under appreciated AngularJS features.

Displaying prices in different currencies is a common internationalization task for web developers. However, this task can be a bit tricky:

AngularJS is blowing up right now, and with good reason. There's nothing more satisfying than using AngularJS to turn 1,000 messy lines of Backbone.js and jQuery spaghetti code into a trivial 10 lines. To put it in a broader context, you can think of AngularJS' place in the world this way: AngularJS is to jQuery as C++11 is to x86 Assembly. However, your quest to capture all the wonderful benefits of AngularJS may be hindered because the documentation is a bit difficult to wrap your mind around. In particular, many readers have told me that the documentation for directives is pretty intimidating, and a lot of experienced users still don't quite grok how to use them properly.

In last week's blog post, I showed you how to install all of the basic tools that you need to get up and running with the MEAN Stack. Didn't catch that one and need help getting started with the MEAN Stack? You can find everything you need in Introduction to the MEAN Stack, Part One.

I've received several emails asking for instructions on how to set up a basic MEAN stack app. I'm going to take it one step further and give you guys a two-part post that will walk you through creating your first MEAN stack app- from installing the tools to actually writing the code. In Part One we'll go through the setup and installation process. Next in Part Two we'll walk through the steps for building a very simple to-do list. Part One consists of seven steps, although only the first two are are strictly necessary.

If you've ever tried to build any kind of website, odds are you've had to create some way of validating and saving input from a form. Back in the bad old days this used to be a huge pain, because there were no good frameworks to help get the job done right. The three primary pain points that you have to deal with when trying to validate a form without the aid of a framework are:

This post was featured as a guest blog post for MongoDB on April 30th 2013, which can be found here