Azure Mobile Services: A Great Back End for AngularJS

摘要

AngularJS is a great framework for building JavaScript applications for both Web and mobile. It's very powerful, but it does come with a bit of a learning curve. To get started, I read blogs and books and watched video courses, which are great for learning client-side features, such as forms, routing and validation. Unfortunately, the client-side topics always seem to overshadow back-end concerns. Most learning resources barely touch on these at all. One course used the Angular $httpBackend service almost exclusively. $httpBackend is a great way to build fakes for testing, but it isn't meant for persisting data for a production application. Another resource used an open source product called deployd, which provides a quick and easy way to get a REST/API back-end server up and running. Deployd is free to download and can run on a development machine or server. It's great for modeling and testing REST APIs. The problem once again is what to do in production. In a production environment, I have to expose a REST/JSON server to the Internet for the AngularJS application to use, but I don't want to be in the business of hosting and managing servers on the Internet. I need to be able to spin up new applications fast and scale up quickly as needed. I need integrated security without a lot of complexity. I need to be able to set up REST/JSON APIs to store the application data. And, I need all of these issues to be easy to learn and integrate with my application. Luckily, in my research I found that Microsoft has already solved these problems. In this article I'll show you how to integrate the Azure Mobile Services back end with an AngularJS front end.