FW Apps Tutorial - Introduction

Now that you have a conceptual understanding of the FW System, we come to the point where we complete the FW App Tutorial. Just as a review, it is important to remember that you are expected to have done the following things before you continue into completing the FW Tutorial:

  • It is expected that you know the coding languages of: HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP. If you do not have a working knowledge of these languages, it is advised that you learn them on a platform, such as CodeAcademy, as provided earlier.
  • It is expected that you have a remedial understanding of working in a terminal, such as Command Line (though you are free to use a terminal such as PowerShell or GitBash if you prefer). If not, you can follow Introduction to Command Line on CodeAcademy (though you should know that if using Command Line the command to see the current directory is dir instead of ls).
  • We also expect you to have completed reading the previous Conceptual Introduction so that you can have a general idea of all of the apps.
  • If you work for Informatics and have not already refreshed yourself on the our Bitbucket Policies please do so at this time.
  • You also need to have installed the Framework Development workspace onto your machine before you can continue. If you have not, you can find the documentation in the FW Installer Docs, here.

If you have successfully completed all these steps, then this guide is the final step into making you into a productive, full-fledged member of the Informatics Developing Team. In this guide, you will walk through the various aspects of an Informatics FW application, and have practical experience working with an FW app specifically designed for training. While you will not know everything at the end of this training, our hope is that you will overcome the overwhelming feeling of trying to develop an app for the first time.

We have five "units" in which you will learn an aspect of either the Ember framework for the client or our own Framework System for the server. You must complete these units in order, as each unit builds upon all previous units. Each of these guides have four headings:

Introduce it! This section will give a quick overview of the topic which we are learning about and how they are important in Informatics Apps.

Learn It! This section is very interactive with the Ember guides. Now, we do not go in the order of the Ember Guides, so it is important that you read only the sections that you are directed to in this section (there should be explanation and links). It is also vital that you DO NOT update the ember guides you are reading to the latest version. At Informatics we use Ember 2.0, NOT Ember 3.0, so learning the newest version of Ember instead of the older version will not help you in the long run at Informatics. So please, use the linked version of Ember, rather than google searching the Ember Guides or “helping” by updating the guides to the latest version once you get there.

Unless otherwise noted, it is expected that you read every page within the section (the link will just take you to the first page). It should be fairly obvious which pages you are to read based on the Ember Guides.

Bring It Home! In this section, you will be having hands on practice with the information you just learned. This is the step where you will dive into our Training Developer App, and fix various bugs and issues within a real Informatics App. In each of these sections, it is important that you test what you code, and double check that it works how the prompt requests.

Finally, each of these units will have a “Challenge” section within the Bring it Home step, where you will be able to creatively figure out how to do something, which is not required. Please only complete the challenge section if you are ahead of schedule and have extra time after you have completed everything else (also please leave yourself thirty minutes to an hour of time to complete the final stage of the unit).

Check it! As with anything, it is important to make sure that you are actually learning to code the way that we want you to. There are multiple ways to skin a cat, but at Informatics, we like code between the apps to be similar, so that any one developer can switch between apps without having to learn a lot of extra things for that specific app. Inevitably, this will happen, but we hope to keep the apps as consistent as possible.

Because of this, after you finish the bring it home section of the unit you are working on, DO NOT MOVE FORWARD. Even if you have been assigned two units to complete in one week, do not move to the next unit yet. Let one of the developer admins know that you have finished your unit, and they will give you access to the Bitbucket repository containing the correct code for this unit. Please compare your code to the code in the repository, and ask any questions about code that you do not understand.

Finally, delete your code on your computer, and download the new repository containing the code given to you, so you can build off that. The reason we do this, is so you will not introduce unknown bugs which will interfere with the productivity of future units.