In this lesson we're going to cover some big ideas that span front-end and back-end development (and life!), and also round out our front-end knowledge by learning about CSS.
- HTML specifies the structure and content of a webpage.
- CSS specifies the presentation or appearance of elements on a webpage.
- JavaScript (in the front-end) lets the developer create interactive elements. It's how the client communicates with the server and the user.
Before CSS, HTML was also used to control the appearance of webpages. This is why websites from the '90s look terrible.
These three technologies embody the principle of separation of concerns — they are each completely responsible for a single aspect of a complex web app.
Most of you have been using a folder structure like the one below. Let's just briefly formalize it:
- /models - contains ORM (object-relational mapping) models (mongoose
Schemas) for our database (MongoDB) - /views - view templates
- /public - all static content
- /images
- /stylesheets
- /javascripts
- /routes - all express routes, separated by app module/area
- /tests - for unit-tests
- /node_modules - created by
npm
There's room for variation in the organization of your static content (you may see an assets folder containing images and other folders if you have many different types of assets) but the other folders are fairly standard, and good for a variety of reasons.
A brief word on jQuery and the JavaScript variable this:
Every JavaScript function is implicitly passed an argument called this.
The variable this is a way of passing a function call a context.
One great application of this is accessing the element that fired a jQuery event.
Here's a common case: I want to bind a click event to all elements with a class my-class, but I want to perform an action specific to the specific element that is clicked. If I bind the event like this:
$('.my-class').click(clickHandler);Then simply doing this in my click handler:
function clickHandler() {
var $clicked = $('.my-class');
// do things with $clicked
}Won't do. The selection $('.my-class') will always return an array containing every single element in the entire document with the class my-class. However, jQuery solves this problem elegantly:
In the example above, clickHandler is our event handler. When an element with my-class is clicked, jQuery handles the event by calling clickHandler and passing the clicked element to the function as this. So we can do this:
function clickHandler() {
var $clicked = $(this); // wrap it in a jQuery selector
// do things with $clicked
}This is how we operate on the element that was clicked.
Open up Codepen, we're going to learn CSS!
CSS (cascading style sheets) is the language that makes the web pretty. It lets us describe the look and formatting of HTML elements. In this way, it separates the concern of the style of the page from all other aspects of a web app. In the early days of the web, HTML was also responsible for this, but all HTML formatting and style directives are now deprecated in favor of CSS.
Every HTML element can be styled by CSS. Elements can be styled by tag name, class, id, and more. Below is an example of basic CSS syntax:
selector {
property: value;
property: value;
...
}Properties can be named in any order, but in the case of directly conflicting properties, the last one defined will apply. Many property names are fairly self-explanatory, but the full property table may serve as a useful reference. Or Google.
Many properties values are lengths, which can be specified in many different ways in CSS. The units below are the most common.
| Unit | Description |
|---|---|
px |
Usually a single pixel on the client's screen (a line of width 1px is guaranteed to be "sharp and visible") |
em |
Relative to the font-size of the element (0.5em is half of the current font-size) |
rem |
Relative to the font-size of the <html> or "root" element (0.5em is half of the root font-size) |
% |
Percent of the parent element along the relevant dimension (horizontally or vertically) |
vh |
(New in CSS3) 1/100th of the viewport height |
vw |
(New in CSS3) 1/100th of the viewport width |
CSS also supports the absolute units cm, mm, in, pt, and pc, but these are better suited for print than the screen.
The most common selector is a tagname, a class (preceded by .), or an id (preceded by #), though there are many other ways to select elements to style.
Styles of elements cascade (apply) to their child elements. In cases where multiple conflicting styles are applied to an element, the more specific style prevails.
So with this document:
<div class="styled">Content</div>and this style:
div {
color white;
background-color: red;
}
.styled {
background-color: blue;
}The single div in the document will have a blue background color because the selector .styled is more specific than div.
Paste the above into Codepen to test it out.
A quick aside on colors, which can be specified in CSS in multiple ways.
| Method | Description |
|---|---|
#RRGGBB |
Red, green, and blue are each specified by a two-digit hex number, 00 to FF. White is #FFFFFF and black is #000000. |
#RGB |
Same as above but with half the precision. |
name |
Certain colors (like red, blue, yellow, etc.) can be specified simply by name. They're mostly hideous but black and white are fine. |
rgb(r,g,b) |
Red, green, and blue are specified on a 0-255 scale. |
rgba(r,g,b,a) |
Same as above, but alpha (opacity) is specified on a 0-1 scale. |
Here's a neat clock that displays the color specified by the hex code corresponding to the current time.
All HTML elements can be modeled as boxes.
CSS allows us to modify that box to affect the display of content.
Below is the styling for a box and its corresponding box model.
The properties under /* metrics */ determine the size of the box and the spacing of its contents.
.styled {
background-color: blue;
color: white;
text-align: center;
/* metrics */
margin: 8px;
border: 2px dotted black;
padding: 8px;
width: 100px;
}
In the image above, the solid border around the yellow box defines the outer edge of the element.
The margin is space between the box and its surroundings.
The border is space between the outer edge and the padding, which defines the space between the inner edge of the border and the content of the element.
As the image above shows, the width property sets the width of the content, not the width of the entire element.
This means that padding and border add to the apparent dimensions of the box.
We can add the below property to change that:
box-sizing: border-box;With this property set, the width and height properties set the dimensions of the box, and those dimensions are not affected by padding or border.
Try playing with these properties in Codepen to see the effect of box-sizing: border-box.
Flexbox is a new layout tool for CSS that allows you to easily define flexible layouts. This article is a great resource and introduction.
You can also use the web inspector in your browser to see and edit the CSS of any page you visit! Just right click on an element and select "Inspect Element", then click the "Styles" tab in the inspector.
Speaking of specificity, CSS also supports nesting, which allows you to change the appearance of elements based on their nesting properties in the HTML. For example, in this situation:
<a href="#">link</a>
<p>This is a paragraph with <a href="#">link</a></p>a {
background-color: red
}
a:hover {
background-color: green;
}
p a {
background-color: green;
}
p a:hover {
background-color: red;
}What this CSS does is specify that links have a red background that becomes green on hover. However, the last two definitions override that with specify - a link that is nested within a p element is the opposite - green, and red on hover.
As you might imagine, this might get unwieldy after a while, in large stylesheets. This is one example of a place where using a CSS pre-processer or extension language like Less or Sass comes in handy.
These are CSS pre-processor languages that allow you to use simpler and more manageable syntax that converts to CSS. Before class, please install Sass. If you have Ruby installed, you can follow the default installation guide. To bypass the Ruby requirement, you can instead install node-sass. Also, please read about Sass features. We'll cover some Sass usage in class.
This class is going to focus just on Sass, because it's more widely used than Less, and the two have very similar features with slightly different syntax. If you're interested in some comparisons between the two, the following articles are optional:
Once you've installed Sass, you can create .sass or .scss stylesheets according to their syntax (the difference is, SCSS uses {} and semicolons, Sass relies on indentation). For consistency and simplicity, this will use SCSS format. Then, you can create your CSS stylesheets:
$ node-sass input.scss output.css
Based on whatever the input file is named, and what type it is.
Writing comprehensive CSS is a lot of work to make your webpage look nice. That's why there are resources for easy use of boilerplate CSS to make your webpages clean and not 90s-esque. Some of the most popular are Bootstrap or its simpler, lightweight friend Skeleton.
Erik Kennedy (actually Olin '10) wrote a great article on UI design targeted at engineers.
It's a great read with lots of tips based on lessons learned by the author after hours of practice and analysis. The Medium staff themselves call it "useful"! Read it and keep it as a reference as you design your website. Your sites should look better than the example. Have fun with it!
By now you've probably seen a lot of errors in your console. Handling errors well is key to writing robust Node apps.
Operational errors are problems that the user can experience while running your program that are not caused by errors with your program's code. The user's system could be out of memory, or the user could supply invalid input.
Programmer errors are bugs in the program code that can be resolved by fixing the code.
Even correct programs cannot avoid all operation errors, so they must handle them correctly. It's up to the programmer both to avoid programmer errors (by writing good code and debugging effectively — we'll cover this later), and to handle operational errors as gracefully as possible.
The standard method signature for a Node callback is this:
function(err, result) {
...
}If there was no error, err is null and result is not.
Otherwise, err is not null and result is.
This is about the simplest way to handle errors:
function(err, result) {
if (err)
return console.error(err);
...
}We can do much more sophisticated things, from attempting to recover from the error to simply informing the user of the error (console.error prints to the server console, so the client is never informed).
Most of our functions are asynchronous (callbacks), so this is a very common way to handle errors in Node. We may cover other ways to handle errors in future classes or deep dives.
As we touched on in class 1, there are many HTTP status codes.
Express makes it easy to set the status of a response.
You can simply chain a call to status in your response, like this:
res.status(404).render('error_404', { data })
...
res.status(500).json({ error: 'message' })Whenever possible, you should set the appropriate response status in this way.
Joyent has great documentation on error handling in Node here.
Learning how to debug is one of the most important things you can get out of learning to program. It's a skill you'll use everywhere, every day. You already do.
Effectively debugging a system means debugging it in context. Your Node webserver runs from your UNIX terminal running on a distribution of Linux, on a computer connected to the internet through a wireless router or ethernet connection. To debug effectively, you have to acknowledge that any part of your system could break and cause problems.
Error messages are not bad. They exist to help you! Without them, you would have no indication of where to start when something went wrong — your app would just crash.
So you should always read them. Focus on the parts of the error message that you understand.
When an error means that the app can no longer function consistently, it should be "thrown". A thrown error produces an exception, and an uncaught exception will crash the app. Whenever your server crashes from an exception, you get a stack trace. The stack trace is kind of like a snapshot of the memory the program was using when and where it crashed — it shows the tree of functions containing the function that caused the crash. If the error was a simple syntactical one, Node might point it right out for you:
/Users/Enigmoid/Git/olinjs/classes/class06/sessions/app.js:26
req.session.counter++;
^^^
SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier
at Module._compile (module.js:439:25)
at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:474:10)
at Module.load (module.js:356:32)
at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12)
at Function.Module.runMain (module.js:497:10)
at startup (node.js:119:16)
at node.js:929:3In this case, we should clearly inspect around line 26 of app.js.
I say around because it's common for the offending line to come before the identified line, but rarely after.
Syntax errors are usually caught when modules are "compiled" by Node for external use.
Here's another stack trace from a slightly sneakier error:
TypeError: Cannot set property 'count' of undefined
at /Users/Enigmoid/Git/olinjs/classes/class06/sessions/app.js:25:26
at Layer.handle [as handle_request] (/Users/Enigmoid/Git/olinjs/classes/class06/sessions/node_modules/express/lib/router/layer.js:82:5)
at next (/Users/Enigmoid/Git/olinjs/classes/class06/sessions/node_modules/express/lib/router/route.js:110:13)
at Route.dispatch (/Users/Enigmoid/Git/olinjs/classes/class06/sessions/node_modules/express/lib/router/route.js:91:3)
at Layer.handle [as handle_request] (/Users/Enigmoid/Git/olinjs/classes/class06/sessions/node_modules/express/lib/router/layer.js:82:5)
at /Users/Enigmoid/Git/olinjs/classes/class06/sessions/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:267:22
at Function.proto.process_params (/Users/Enigmoid/Git/olinjs/classes/class06/sessions/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:321:12)
at next (/Users/Enigmoid/Git/olinjs/classes/class06/sessions/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:261:10)
at Object.<anonymous> (/Users/Enigmoid/Git/olinjs/classes/class06/sessions/node_modules/express-session/index.js:421:7)
at Object.immediate._onImmediate (timers.js:372:16)At some point, you'll probably encounter an error message which mentions undefined, like undefined is not a [function|object].
The broken code (which should be your code) is usually at the top of the stack trace — here we can see that it is still in app.js, this time on line 25. The offending line tried to set a property of an undefined property on the req.cookies object.
Stack traces are useful to find what line of code caused the app to crash. Depending on the error, this line could be all the information you need, or could be relatively useless. But the computer is always following a set of unbreakable rules, so no information should be completely discounted when bugging.
Someone else has already found your error and asked about it on the internet — this is why Googling your error messages is so helpful. You'll often find an answered StackOverflow question. This is the best place to start — error messages are designed to be helpful, but they only contain so much information on their own.
Calls by your Node server to console.log, error messages, exceptions, and stack traces go to the server console.
When you deploy to Heroku, you can access your server console output with heroku logs.
When you write and debug front-end JavaScript, all console.log calls, error messages, exceptions, and stack traces go to the console in your browser, accessible through the web inspector.
It's easy to go very far down a debugging path only to realize that it was the wrong path. One of the most difficult things about debugging is deciding where to start.
The computer doesn't know what you mean, just what you say. Programming is an exercise of boiling down your understanding of a problem to something a machine can understand. The computer does exactly what you tell it to do, 100% of the time.
All the time.
This means that no matter what, something you did is always responsible for the behavior of your program. In one sense, every error is your fault. But more importantly, you always have complete control. If you can break your program, you can make it run.
Starting with something that works and making incremental changes are the two best ways to maintain an understanding of how the code you write controls the behavior of your program.
Git is a fantastic enabler in this endeavor!
A simple way to keep your code modular and use namespaces to prevent overwriting variable names is through this structure:
var yourNamespace = {
foo: function() {
},
bar: function() {
}
};
...
yourNamespace.foo();Read this article on a similar design called the module pattern
Additionally, you can modularize your code by looking at naming conventions like BEM, which is a generally accepted way to keep your CSS classes readable and easily usable.
Another nice way to organize code is to use helper libraries like lodash or underscore. This article does a comparison of the two and ends up recommending lodash. The two have very similar functionalities and syntax.
Install lodash through:
$ {sudo -H} npm i -g npm
$ npm i --save lodashand then use it in Node: var _ = require('lodash');
Read through the lodash docs (or check out their searchable interface) to get an idea of some of the useful helper functions