Angular Saxon Summer Update

My side project over the summer started with a premise: using Saxon-CE, the client-side port of the popular Saxon library, on a Firefox OS device. It didn't work on the Simulator, and I worked on some different Mobile Health work on PhoneGap and Android, and then one day, Saxon-CE just started working under both PhoneGap and Firefox OS. A new Simulator had come out, and the stars had aligned.

Firefox OS provides native support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) using XMLHttpResponse (XHR), as well as native support for JSON. I knew that I wanted to use XML, but I was finding JSON useful as well. About this time, I became involved with the Prescription Medication Information Exchange (PMIX) demo, which is part of David Webber's Open-XDX project, which is an extension of OASIS CAM. And it supports both JSON and XML endpoints. I had also been working with HL7 FHIR, which also supports REST, JSON and XML.

So at that point, I had a rudimentary XSLT view which ran as an application on Firefox OS, backed by Open-XDX. Not very useful, considering that Firefox OS devices had not at this point begun shipping commercially (they still haven't). So I turned my focus back to PhoneGap for Android. Without native support for CORS XHR, I needed JQuery and Backbone, and I started down that path; however, this didn't allow me to share code between PhoneGap and Firefox OS, since JQuery and Backbone were over-powered for what I wanted to accomplish.

Then I watched the AngularJS demo video. I had worked with Thymeleaf on the server-side, and the idea of attribute driven directives in the HTML seemed very natural. It is. I have no doubt that these directives will soon find their way into native support in browsers. Try it. It's practical magic, and it works. Better than JQuery, I feel, once you get used to it.

As I worked with these technologies, I started to have a feeling, and I am starting to see that it is more or less accurate: with planning, a common code base can be used with PhoneGap and Native Browser Mobile like ChromeOS and Firefox OS, using a Dependency Injection framework like AngularJS with a templating framework like Saxon-CE. More than this, Angular and JSON shine on PhoneGap, where you are contending with an existing VM, and Saxon-CE runs really slow; on Firefox OS, with native JavaScript, AngularJS is harder to work with and less necessary, and Saxon-CE performs well.

#AngularSaxon #AngularSummer