Messages Frontend

This simple single page application runs against the REST API exposed in messages.

Getting Started

This application utilizes the Yeoman frontend workflow system - you can install that using:

npm install -g yo npm install -g grunt npm install -g grunt-cli

Finally install all of the local packages for the build system:

npm install

It also uses compass, which is a SASS compiler to manage building Twitter Bootstrap. To install that, you need to install Ruby on your system. For Windows users, there are prepackaged binaries that you can use to do this. Have a look at (http://rubyinstaller.org/)[http://rubyinstaller.org/] for more details.

Once you have Ruby installed, install the compass gem:

gem install compass

We're using an ember.js application in this sample, so also install the generator for this application type:

npm install -g generator-ember

Then, if you want to start clean with your own ember.js app, do:

yo ember

in a blank directory and Yeoman will scaffold an ember.js application for you, including build tools. Or you can just clone and start with this repo for your work.

Fetching dependencies

Yeoman uses bower for frontend dependencies. Bower automatically fetches and keeps the dependencies updated that your project relies on. You can think of it as a frontend package manager that works sort of like npm does for node.js modules. To install your dependencies:

bower install

Running Messages

You can start a server locally and run this application using:

grunt server

Deploying Messages

Before deploying messages you first need to build the deployment assets that have been consolidated and minified:

grunt build

This should build a dist directory at the top level of this project with the assets that need to be deployed on your static web server (IIS, Apache, NGINX). I've included a script that copies this to a deployment Git repo and readies it for deployment.

If this is your first time deploying, create this deployment directory at the same level as messages-frontend called messages-deploy and run git init in it to initialize a git repo.

Then run:

scripts/prep-deployment

This combines and minifies the JavaScript, HTML, and CSS into single files.

You can Git deploy this application to Windows Azure directly. Just create a new Web Site in Windows Azure and then configure a Git repo in Windows Azure in the dashboard tab for that website. Then just git push this deployment repo to that site.