Good tools make the Internet responsive and interactive and put its control in the hands of developers. The Knockout library is well-known because it is a pair of boxing gloves that work well in the ring! What jQuery did for JavaScript years ago, Knockout is doing for smart data management with the browser elements. With this library, you will find another way to enjoy building web technology, while building sites that end users will enjoy just as much. If you know the basics of JavaScript and HTML, this book will soon make you a champion.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with KnockoutJS, teaches you what Knockout is and why it is different. This chapter gets you coding and opens the door to a simpler and more powerful way of building web pages.
Chapter 2, Using Arrays, Nesting, and Grids, continues opening your mind to less code with more power. There is special coverage on dynamic sorting of data collections that will put power coding in the hands of newer developers.
Chapter 3, Giving Forms the Knockout Touch, demonstrates the use of Knockout to make our web forms easier and fun to build. This covers both simple and grid-based forms.
Chapter 4, Coding – AJAX, Binding Properties, Mapping, and Utilities, proves that Knockout is not just a stand-alone solution. It is a technology that connects and simplifies our interaction, and it has a number of awesome plugins that will make you eager to use it in your projects.
Chapter 5, The Joy of Templates, covers native templates, enhanced collection handling, render events, third-party templates, and a few more template options.
Chapter 6, Packaged Elegance, takes you into the future of web development. This chapter covers present-day use of custom components in all popular browsers. We will use this opportunity to cover another way of building a simplified and powerful SPA, single-page applications, and solutions.
First, you will need a computer with a web server. The examples will run on any common server, so a special server-side language is not required. You will need a text editor, and if you want to use the exercise files, you will need to be able to decompress a ZIP file. There is a built-in provision for this in most modern computers. Finally, you will need a browser to view your work.
This book is for web developers or web designers who work with HTML and wants to gain knowledge while making things simple. This will show you how to automate, with some simple markup, the interaction between your data and the visual side of the browser. If you are looking to get the best experience with cleaner and more sustainable code, this book will serve you well.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and explanations of their meanings.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We will need to use the push method of our bound array collection to add this."
A block of code is set as follows:
<button data-bind="click: sort('name')">Sort By Name</button>
<button data-bind="click: sort('item')">Sort By Item</button>When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
this.orderVM = new ko.simpleGrid.viewModel({
data: this.orders,
columns: [
{ headerText: "Customer", rowText: "name"},
{ headerText: "Item", rowText: "item"},
{ headerText: "Count", rowText: "qty"}
],
pageSize: 3
});Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
> pagedOrderModel.orders()
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Add Staff button."
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