modelFactory

A light-weight model layer that bridges the gap between AngularJS and your RESTful APIs.

Why would you use this over other available solutions?

• Lightweight/Simple, the code simply does some basic copy/extending and prototypical instances; no magic required.
• Patterns/Practices, the model definition closely resembles Angular's ngResource meaning its easy to swap out, replace later, eases scaling/transition, and its designed for Angular; not a backbone port!
• Utilizes Angular at the core, it doesn't duplicate things Angular already does. Any action can be passed a $http configuration option, all your interceptors still work, it uses Angular's cache, etc!
• Compliant, URI Template matches the specs.
• Small - 1.45KB gzipped/minified ( excludes depedencies )
• Minimal Dependencies, only use URI template and deep-diff ( this isn't even required ) utility. NO underscore, lodash, jquery, etc!
• Its full of awesome features

See wiki for documentation.

Features

• URI Templates (RFC6570)
• Model instances
• Collections
• Single Datastore
• Caching / Cache invalidation
• Default value population
• Pending / Completed Status
• Relationships
• Object Deep Diff / Reversion
• Track active promises to prevent duplicate sends

Other Solutions

After doing quite a bit of research before writing this, I took a look at other solutions. Here is what I found and why I wrote my own.

• Restmod Very nice solution but very opinionated and hyper-active. 22kb min

• Modelizer Good but requires Lodash. 23kb min

• ModelCore Good but not very well tested and not active.

• angular-watch-resource - Really only handles collections

• angular-restful - Very basic but nice

• ngResource Out of the box model layer, very limited.

• angularjs-rails-resource Too rails-ish.

• angular-nested-resource - Okay API, not loving the nested architecture.

• Aar.js Very light, not sure what value this adds.

• Angular Activerecord A copy of BackboneModel but doesn't really work with Angular patterns.

• Angular-Data Not really a model layer but a data store. Very very heavy ( 67kb min )

• ngActiveResource Very ruby-ish api. Requires lodash. Has validation but thats not needed in angular if you do it right.

• restangular I don't consider this a model layer; it feels moore like a fancy http layer that returns promises because everyone complains about ngResource not doing it. It requires underscore.

• BreezeJS This is a very full featured model/cache/validation etc. Its framework agnostic, which means it follows its own patterns and not angulars. Its very heavy, requires server data massaging, and the API looks like Microsoft Entity Framework.

• ng-backbone Another backbone model clone. This one actually requires backbone and lodash.

Dependencies

• Angular >= 1.3
• deep-diff
• uri-templates

Development

Prepare your environment

• Install Node.js and NPM (should come with)
• Install global dev dependencies: npm install -g bower grunt-cli
• Install local dev dependencies: npm install && bower install in repository directory

Development Commands

• grunt build to concat and build
• grunt karma for continuous testing mode with karma (useful during development as tests will be run on each change)
• grunt karma:ci for a one-time execution of the tests (used by Travis)

Contributing

• Run the tests
• Create a feature branch
• When issuing a pull request, please exclude changes from the "dist" folder to avoid merge conflicts.