Line-of-Business (LOB) applications are the bread and butter of the software development world. As defined in Wikipedia, LOB is a general term, which refers to a product or a set of related products that serve a particular customer transaction or business need. LOB apps present a good opportunity to demonstrate a variety of features and functionality without getting into contorted or specialized scenarios that large enterprise applications usually require. In a sense, they are the 80-20 learning experience. I must, however, point out a curious thing about LOB apps—if you end up building a semi-useful LOB app, the demand for it will grow uncontrollably, and you will quickly become the victim of your own success. This is why you should treat the start of every new project as an opportunity, a coding-kata if you will, to get better at creating more flexible architectures.
In this chapter and the remaining chapters, we’ll set up a new application with rich features that can meet the demands of an LOB application with a scalable architecture and engineering best practices that will help you start small and be able to grow your solution quickly if there’s demand. We will follow the Router-first design pattern, relying on reusable components to create a grocery store LOB named LemonMart.
In this chapter, you will learn to do the following:
- Effectively use CLI to create major Angular Components and CLI Scaffolds
- Learn how to build Router-first Apps
- Branding, Custom and Material Iconography
- Debug complicated apps with Augury
- Enable lazy loading
- Create a walking skeleton
The code samples provided in this book require Angular version 5 and 6. Angular 5 code is runtime compatible with Angular 6. Angular 6 will be supported in LTS until October 2019. The most up-to-date versions of the code repositories may be found at the following URLs:
- For Chapters 2 to 6, LocalCast Weather at Github.com/duluca/local-weather-app
- For Chapters 7 to 12, LemonMart at Github.com/duluca/lemon-mart