Introduction to Programming Languages

and Tools of the Trade

This lesson covers the basics of programming languages. The topics covered here apply to most
modern programming languages today. In the 'Tools of the Trade' section, you'll learn about useful
software that helps you as a developer.

Sketchnote by Tomomi Imura

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz
Introduction
In this lesson, we'll cover:
What is programming?
Types of programming languages
Basic elements of a program
Useful software and tooling for the professional developer

You can take this lesson on Microsoft Learn!

What is Programming?
Programming (also known as coding) is the process of writing instructions to a device, such as a
computer or mobile device. We write these instructions with a programming language, which is then
interpreted by the device. These sets of instructions may be referred to by various names, but
program, computer program, application (app), and executable are a few popular names.
A program can be anything that is written with code; websites, games, and phone apps are programs.
While it's possible to create a program without writing code, the underlying logic is interpreted to the
device and that logic was most likely written with code. A program that is running or executing code
is carrying out instructions. The device that you're currently reading this lesson with is running a
program to print it to your screen.
✅ Do a little research: who is considered to have been the world's first computer programmer?

Programming Languages
Programming languages serve a main purpose: for developers to build instructions to send to a
device. Devices only can understand binary (1s and 0s), and for most developers that's not a very
efficient way to communicate. Programming languages are a vehicle for communication between
humans and computers.
Programming languages come in different formats and may serve different purposes. For example,
JavaScript is primarily used for web applications, while Bash is primarily used for operating systems.
Low level languages typically require fewer steps than high level languages for a device to interpret
instructions. However, what makes high level languages popular is their readability and support.
JavaScript is considered a high level language.
The following code illustrates the difference between a high level language with JavaScript and low
level language with ARM assembly code.
javascript

let number = 10
let n1 = 0, n2 = 1, nextTerm;

for (let i = 1; i <= number; i++) {

console.log(n1);
nextTerm = n1 + n2;
n1 = n2;
n2 = nextTerm;
}

area ascen,code,readonly
entry
code32
adr r0,thumb+1
bx r0
code16
thumb
mov r0,#00
sub r0,r0,#01
mov r1,#01
mov r4,#10
ldr r2,=0x40000000
back add r0,r1
str r0,[r2]
add r2,#04
mov r3,r0
mov r0,r1
mov r1,r3
sub r4,#01
cmp r4,#00
bne back
end

Believe it or not, they're both doing the same thing: printing a Fibonacci sequence up to 10.
✅ A Fibonacci sequence is defined as a set of numbers such that each number is the sum of the two
preceding ones, starting from 0 and 1.

Elements of a program
A single instruction in a program is called a statement and will usually have a character or line spacing
that marks where the instruction ends, or terminates. How a program terminates varies with each
language.
Most programs rely on using data from a user or elsewhere, where statements may rely on data to
carry out instructions. Data can change how a program behaves, so programming languages come
with a way to temporarily store data that can be used later. This data is called variables. Variables are
statements that instruct a device to save data in its memory. Variables in programs are similar to ones
in algebra, where they have a unique name and their value may change over time.
There's a chance that some statements will not be executed by a device. This is usually by design
when written by the developer or by accident when an unexpected error occurs. This type of control
of an application makes it more robust and maintainable. Typically these changes in control happen
when certain decisions are met. A common statement in modern programming languages to control
how a program is run is the if..else statement.
✅ You'll learn more about this type of statement in subsequent lessons

Tools of the Trade

 🎥 Click the image above for a video about tooling

In this section, you'll learn about some software that you might find very useful as you start your
professional development journey.
A development environment is a unique set of tools and features that a developer will use often
when writing software. Some of these tools have been customized for a developer specific needs,
and may change over time if a developer changes priorities in work or personal projects, or when they
use a different programming language. Development environments are as unique as the developers
who use them.

Editors
One of the most crucial tools for software development is the editor. Editors are where you write your
code and sometimes where you will run your code.
Developers rely on editors for a few additional reasons:
Debugging Discovering bugs and errors by stepping through code, line by line. Some editors have
debugging capabilities, or can be customized and added for specific programming languages.
Syntax highlighting Adds colors and text formatting to code, makes it easier to read. Most editors
allow customized syntax highlighting.
Extensions and Integrations Additions that are specialized for developers, by developers, for
access to additional tools that aren't built into the base editor. For example, many developers also
need a way to document their code and explain how it works and will install a spell check
extension to check for typos. Most of these additions are intended for use within a specific editor,
and most editors come with a way to search for available extensions.
Customization Most editors are extremely customizable, and each developer will have their own
unique development environment that suits their needs. Many also allow developers to create
their own extensions.

Popular Editors and Web Development Extensions

Visual Studio Code
Code Spell Checker
Live Share
Prettier - Code formatter
Atom
spell-check
teletype
 atom-beautify

Browsers
Another crucial tool is the browser. Web developers rely on the browser to observe how their code
runs on the web, it's also used to view visual elements of a web page that are written in the editor, like
HTML.
Many browsers come with developer tools (DevTools) that contain a set of helpful features and
information to assist developers to collect and capture important insights about their application. For
example: If a web page has errors, it's sometimes helpful to know when they occurred. DevTools in a
browser can be configured to capture this information.

Popular Browsers and DevTools

Edge
Chrome
Firefox

Command Line Tools

Some developers prefer a less graphical view for their daily tasks and rely on the command line to
achieve this. Developing code requires a significant amount of typing, and some developers prefer to
not disrupt their flow on the keyboard and will use keyboard shortcuts to swap between desktop
windows, work on different files, and use tools. Most tasks can be completed with a mouse, but one
benefit of using the command line is that a lot can be done with command line tools without the need
of swapping between the mouse and keyboard. Another benefit of the command line is that they're
configurable and you can save your custom configuration, change it later, and also import it to new
development machines. Because development environments are so unique to each developer, some
will avoid using the command line, some will rely on it entirely, and some prefer a mix of the two.

Popular Command Line Options

Options for the command line will differ based on the operating system you use.
💻 = comes preinstalled on the operating system.

Windows
Powershell 💻
 Command Line (also known as CMD) 💻
Windows Terminal
mintty

MacOS
Terminal 💻
iTerm
Powershell

Linux
Bash 💻
KDE Konsole
Powershell

Popular Command Line Tools

Git (💻 on most operating systems)
NPM
Yarn

Documentation
When a developer wants to learn something new, they'll most likely turn to documentation to learn
how to use it. Developers rely on documentation often to guide them through how to use tools and
languages properly, and also to gain deeper knowledge of how it works.

Popular Documentation on Web Development

Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), from Mozilla, the publishers of the Firefox browser
Frontend Masters
Web.dev, from Google, publishers of Chrome
Microsoft's own developer docs, for Microsoft Edge
✅ Do some research: Now that you know the basics of a web developer's environment, compare
and contrast it with a web designer's environment.
🚀 Challenge
Compare some programming languages. What are some of the unique traits of JavaScript vs. Java?
How about COBOL vs. Go?

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

Study a bit on the different languages available to the programmer. Try to write a line in one language,
and then redo it in two others. What do you learn?

Assignment
Reading the Docs

Introduction to GitHub
This lesson covers the basics of GitHub, a platform to host and manage changes to your code.
 Sketchnote by Tomomi Imura

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz

Introduction
In this lesson, we'll cover:
tracking the work you do on your machine
working on projects with others
how to contribute to open source software

Prerequisites
Before you begin, you'll need to check if Git is installed. In the terminal type: git --version
If Git is not installed, download Git. Then, setup your local Git profile in the terminal:
git config --global user.name "your-name"
git config --global user.email "your-email"

To check if Git is already configured you can type: git config --list
You'll also need a GitHub account, a code editor (like Visual Studio Code), and you'll need to open
your terminal (or: command prompt).
Navigate to github.com and create an account if you haven't already, or log in and fill out your profile.
✅ GitHub isn't the only code repository in the world; there are others, but GitHub is the best known

Preparation
You'll need both a folder with a code project on your local machine (laptop or PC), and a public
repository on GitHub, which will serve as an example for how to contribute to the projects of others.

Code management
Let's say you have a folder locally with some code project and you want to start tracking your
progress using git - the version control system. Some people compare using git to writing a love letter
to your future self. Reading your commit messages days or weeks or months later you'll be able to
recall why you made a decision, or "rollback" a change - that is, when you write good "commit
messages".

Task: Make a repository and commit code

1. Create repository on GitHub. On GitHub.com, in the repositories tab, or from the navigation bar
top-right, find the new repo button.
1. Give your repository (folder) a name
2. Select create repository.
2. Navigate to your working folder. In your terminal, switch to the folder (also known as the
directory) you want to start tracking. Type:
 bash

cd [name of your folder]

3. Initialize a git repository. In your project type:

bash

git init

4. Check status. To check the status of your repository type:

bash

git status

the output can look something like this:

output

Changes not staged for commit:

(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory

modified: file.txt
modified: file2.txt

Typically a git status command tells you things like what files are ready to be saved to the
repo or has changes on it that you might want to persist.
5. Add all files for tracking This also called as staging files/ adding files to the staging area.
bash

git add .

The git add plus . argument indicates that all your files & changes for tracking.
6. Add selected files for tracking
bash

git add [file or folder name]

This helps us to add only selected files to the staging area when we don't want to commit all files
at once.
7. Unstage all files
 bash

git reset

This command helps us to unstage all files at once.

8. Unstage a particular file
bash

git reset [file or folder name]

This command helps us to unstage only a particular file at once that we don't want to include for
the next commit.
9. Persisting your work. At this point you've added the files to a so called staging area. A place
where Git is tracking your files. To make the change permanent you need to commit the files. To
do so you create a commit with the git commit command. A commit represents a saving
point in the history of your repo. Type the following to create a commit:
bash

git commit -m "first commit"

This commits all of your files, adding the message "first commit". For future commit messages
you will want to be more descriptive in your description to convey what type of change you've
made.
10. Connect your local Git repo with GitHub. A Git repo is good on your machine but at some point
you want to have backup of your files somewhere and also invite other people to work with you on
your repo. One such great place to do so is GitHub. Remember we've already created a repo on
GitHub so the only thing we need to do is to connect our local Git repo with GitHub. The
command git remote add will do just that. Type the following command:

Note, before you type the command go to your GitHub repo page to find the repository
URL. You will use it in the below command. Replace repository_name with your
GitHub URL.

bash

git remote add origin https://github.com/username/repository_name.git

This creates a remote, or connection, named "origin" pointing at the GitHub repository you
created earlier.
11. Send local files to GitHub. So far you've created a connection between the local repo and the
GitHub repo. Let's send these files to GitHub with the following command git push , like so:
bash

git push -u origin main

This sends your commits in your "main" branch to GitHub.

12. To add more changes. If you want to continue making changes and pushing them to GitHub youʼll
just need to use the following three commands:
bash

git add .
git commit -m "type your commit message here"
git push

Tip, You might also want to adopt a .gitignore file to prevent files you don't want to
track from showing up on GitHub - like that notes file you store in the same folder but has
no place on a public repository. You can find templates for .gitignore files at
.gitignore templates.

Commit messages
A great Git commit subject line completes the following sentence: If applied, this commit will
For the subject use the imperative, present tense: "change" not "changed" nor "changes". As in the
subject, in the body (optional) also use the imperative, present tense. The body should include the
motivation for the change and contrast this with previous behavior. You're explaining the why , not
the how .
✅ Take a few minutes to surf around GitHub. Can you find a really great commit message? Can you
find a really minimal one? What information do you think is the most important and useful to convey in
a commit message?

Task: Collaborate
The main reason for putting things on GitHub was to make it possible to collaborate with other
developers.
Working on projects with others
In your repository, navigate to Insights > Community to see how your project compares to
recommended community standards.
Here are some things that can improve your GitHub repo:
Description. Did you add a description for your project?
README. Did you add a README? GitHub provides guidance for writing a README.
Contributing guideline. Does your project have contributing guidelines,
Code of Conduct. a Code of Conduct,
License. Perhaps most importantly, a license?
All these resources will benefit onboarding new team members. And those are typically the kind of
things new contributors look at before even looking at your code, to find out if your project is the right
place for them to be spending their time.
✅ README files, although they take time to prepare, are often neglected by busy maintainers. Can
you find an example of a particularly descriptive one? Note: there are some tools to help create good
READMEs that you might like to try.

Task: Merge some code

Contributing docs help people contribute to the project. It explains what types of contributions you're
looking for and how the process works. Contributors will need to go through a series of steps to be
able to contribute to your repo on GitHub:
1. Forking your repo You will probably want people to fork your project. Forking means creating a
replica of your repository on their GitHub profile.
2. Clone. From there they will clone the project to their local machine.
3. Create a branch. You will want to ask them to create a branch for their work.
4. Focus their change on one area. Ask contributors to concentrate their contributions on one thing
at a time - that way the chances that you can merge in their work is higher. Imagine they write a
bug fix, add a new feature, and update several tests - what if you want to, or can only implement 2
out of 3, or 1 out of 3 changes?
✅ Imagine a situation where branches are particularly critical to writing and shipping good code.
What use cases can you think of?

Note, be the change you want to see in the world, and create branches for your own work as
well. Any commits you make will be made on the branch youʼre currently “checked out” to.
 Use git status to see which branch that is.

Let's go through a contributor workflow. Assume the contributor has already forked and cloned the
repo so they have a Git repo ready to be worked on, on their local machine:
1. Create a branch. Use the command git branch to create a branch that will contain the
changes they mean to contribute:
bash

git branch [branch-name]

2. Switch to working branch. Switch to the specified branch and update the working directory with
git checkout :

bash

git checkout [branch-name]

3. Do work. At this point you want to add your changes. Don't forget to tell Git about it with the
following commands:
bash

git add .
git commit -m "my changes"

Ensure you give your commit a good name, for your sake as well as the maintainer of the repo you
are helping on.
4. Combine your work with the main branch. At some point you are done working and you want
to combine your work with that of the main branch. The main branch might have changed
meanwhile so make sure you first update it to the latest with the following commands:
bash

git checkout main

git pull

At this point you want to make sure that any conflicts, situations where Git can't easily combine
the changes happens in your working branch. Therefore run the following commands:
bash

git checkout [branch_name]

git merge main
 This will bring in all changes from main into your branch and hopefully you can just continue. If
not, VS Code will tell you where Git is confused and you just alter the affected files to say which
content is the most accurate.
5. Send your work to GitHub. Sending your work to GitHub means two things. Pushing your branch
to your repo and then open up a PR, Pull Request.
bash

git push --set-upstream origin [branch-name]

The above command creates the branch on your forked repo.

6. Open a PR. Next, you want to open up a PR. You do that by navigating to the forked repo on
GitHub. You will see an indication on GitHub where it asks whether you want to create a new PR,
you click that and you are taken to an interface where you can change commit message title, give
it a more suitable description. Now the maintainer of the repo you forked will see this PR and
fingers crossed they will appreciate and merge your PR. You are now a contributor, yay :)
7. Clean up. It's considered good practice to clean up after you successfully merge a PR. You want
to clean up both your local branch and the branch you pushed to GitHub. First let's delete it locally
with the following command:
bash

git branch -d [branch-name]

Ensure you go the GitHub page for the forked repo next and remove the remote branch you just
pushed to it.
Pull request seems like a silly term because really you want to push your changes to the
project. But the maintainer (project owner) or core team needs to consider your changes before
merging it with the project's "main" branch, so you're really requesting a change decision from a
maintainer.
A pull request is the place to compare and discuss the differences introduced on a branch with
reviews, comments, integrated tests, and more. A good pull request follows roughly the same rules as
a commit message. You can add a reference to an issue in the issue tracker, when your work for
instance fixes an issue. This is done using a # followed by the number of your issue. For example
#97 .

🤞 Fingers crossed that all checks pass and the project owner(s) merge your changes into the project
🤞
Update your current local working branch with all new commits from the corresponding remote
branch on GitHub:
 git pull

How to contribute to open source

First, let's find a repository (or repo) on GitHub of interest to you and to which you'd like to contribute
a change. You will want to copy its contents to your machine.
✅ A good way to find 'beginner-friendly' repos is to search by the tag 'good-first-issue'.

There are several ways of copying code. One way is to "clone" the contents of the repository, using
HTTPS, SSH, or using the GitHub CLI (Command Line Interface).
Open your terminal and clone the repository like so:
git clone https://github.com/ProjectURL

To work on the project, switch to the right folder: cd ProjectURL

You can also open the entire project using Codespaces, GitHub's embedded code editor / cloud
development environment, or GitHub Desktop.
Lastly, you can download the code in a zipped folder.
A few more interesting things about GitHub
You can star, watch and/or "fork" any public repository on GitHub. You can find your starred
repositories in the top-right drop-down menu. It's like bookmarking, but for code.
Projects have an issue tracker, mostly on GitHub in the "Issues" tab unless indicated otherwise,
where people discuss issues related to the project. And the Pull Requests tab is where people
discuss and review changes that are in progress.
Projects might also have discussion in forums, mailing lists, or chat channels like Slack, Discord or
IRC.
✅ Take a look around your new GitHub repo and try a few things, like editing settings, adding
information to your repo, and creating a project (like a Kanban board). There's a lot you can do!

🚀 Challenge
Pair with a friend to work on each other's code. Create a project collaboratively, fork code, create
branches, and merge changes.

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

Read more about contributing to open source software.
Git cheatsheet.
Practice, practice, practice. GitHub has great learning paths available via lab.github.com:
First Week on GitHub
You'll also find more advanced labs.
Assignment
Complete the First Week on GitHub training lab

Creating Accessible Webpages

Sketchnote by Tomomi Imura

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an
essential aspect.
 - Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

This quote perfectly highlights the importance of creating accessible websites. An application that
can't be accessed by all is by definition exclusionary. As web developers we should always have
accessibility in mind. By having this focus from the beginning you will be well on your way to ensure
everyone can access the pages you create. In this lesson, you'll learn about the tools that can help
you ensure that your web assets are accessible and how to build with accessibility in mind.

You can take this lesson on Microsoft Learn!

Tools to use
Screen readers
One of the best-known accessibility tools are screen readers.
Screen readers are commonly used clients for those with vision impairments. As we spend time
ensuring a browser properly conveys the information we wish to share, we must also ensure a screen
reader does the same.
At its most basic, a screen reader will read a page from top to bottom audibly. If your page is all text,
the reader will convey the information in a similar fashion to a browser. Of course, web pages are
rarely purely text; they will contain links, graphics, color, and other visual components. Care must be
taken to ensure that this information is read correctly by a screen reader.
Every web developer should familiarize themselves with a screen reader. As highlighted above, it's
the client your users will utilize. Much in the same way you're familiar with how a browser operates,
you should learn how a screen reader operates. Fortunately, screen readers are built into most
operating systems.
Some browsers also have built-in tools and extensions that can read text aloud or even provide some
basic navigational features, such as these accessibility-focused Edge browser tools. These are also
important accessibility tools, but function very differently from screen readers and they should not be
mistaken for screen reader testing tools.
✅ Try a screen reader and browser text reader. On Windows Narrator is included by default, and
JAWS and NVDA can also be installed. On macOS and iOS, VoiceOver is installed by default.
Zoom
Another tool commonly used by people with vision impairments is zooming. The most basic type of
zooming is static zoom, controlled through Control + plus sign (+) or by decreasing screen
resolution. This type of zoom causes the entire page to resize, so using responsive design is
important to provide a good user experience at increased zoom levels.
Another type of zoom relies on specialized software to magnify one area of the screen and pan, much
like using a real magnifying glass. On Windows, Magnifier is built in, and ZoomText is a third-party
magnification software with more features and a larger user base. Both macOS and iOS have a built-
in magnification software called Zoom.

Contrast checkers
Colors on web sites need to be carefully chosen to answer the needs of color-blind users or people
who have difficulty seeing low-contrast colors.
✅ Test a web site you enjoy using for color usage with a browser extension such as WCAG's color
checker. What do you learn?

Lighthouse
In the developer tool area of your browser, you'll find the Lighthouse tool. This tool is important to get
a first view of the accessibility (as well as other analysis) of a web site. While it's important not to rely
exclusively on Lighthouse, a 100% score is very helpful as a baseline.
✅ Find Lighthouse in your browser's developer tool panel and run an analysis on any site. what do
you discover?

Designing for accessibility

Accessibility is a relatively large topic. To help you out, there are numerous resources available.
Accessible U - University of Minnesota
While we won't be able to cover every aspect of creating accessible sites, below are some of the core
tenets you will want to implement. Designing an accessible page from the start is always easier than
going back to an existing page to make it accessible.
Good display principles
Color safe palettes
People see the world in different ways, and this includes colors. When selecting a color scheme for
your site, you should ensure it's accessible to all. One great tool for generating color palettes is Color
Safe.
✅ Identify a web site that is very problematic in its use of color. Why?

Use the correct HTML

With CSS and JavaScript it's possible to make any element look like any type of control. <span>
could be used to create a <button> , and <b> could become a hyperlink. While this might be
considered easier to style, it conveys nothing to a screen reader. Use the appropriate HTML when
creating controls on a page. If you want a hyperlink, use <a> . Using the right HTML for the right
control is called making use of Semantic HTML.
✅ Go to any web site and see if the designers and developers are using HTML properly. Can you find
a button that should be a link? Hint: right click and choose 'View Page Source' in your browser to look
at underlying code.

Create a descriptive heading hierarchy

Screen reader users rely heavily on headings to find information and navigate through a page. Writing
descriptive heading content and using semantic heading tags are important for creating an easily
navigable site for screen reader users.

Use good visual clues

CSS offers complete control over the look of any element on a page. You can create text boxes
without an outline or hyperlinks without an underline. Unfortunately removing those clues can make it
more challenging for someone who depends on them to be able to recognize the type of control.

The importance of link text

Hyperlinks are core to navigating the web. As a result, ensuring a screen reader can properly read
links allows all users to navigate your site.
Screen readers and links
As you would expect, screen readers read link text in the same way they'd read any other text on the
page. With this in mind, the text demonstrated below might feel perfectly acceptable.

The little penguin, sometimes known as the fairy penguin, is the smallest penguin in the world.
Click here for more information.

The little penguin, sometimes known as the fairy penguin, is the smallest penguin in the world.
Visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_penguin for more information.

NOTE As you're about to read, you should never create links which look like the above.

Remember, screen readers are a different interface from browsers with a different set of features.

The problem with using the URL

Screen readers read the text. If a URL appears in the text, the screen reader will read the URL.
Generally speaking, the URL does not convey meaningful information, and can sound annoying. You
may have experienced this if your phone has ever audibly read a text message with a URL.

The problem with "click here"

Screen readers also have the ability to read only the hyperlinks on a page, much in the same way a
sighted person would scan a page for links. If the link text is always "click here", all the user will hear
is "click here, click here, click here, click here, click here, ..." All links are now indistinguishable from
one another.

Good link text

Good link text briefly describes what's on the other side of the link. In the above example talking
about little penguins, the link is to the Wikipedia page about the species. The phrase little penguins
would make for perfect link text as it makes it clear what someone will learn about if they click the link
- little penguins.
 The little penguin, sometimes known as the fairy penguin, is the smallest penguin in the world.

✅ Surf the web for a few minutes to find pages that use obscure linking strategies. Compare them
with other, better-linked sites. What do you learn?

Search engine notes

As an added bonus for ensuring your site is accessible to all, you'll help search engines navigate your
site as well. Search engines use link text to learn the topics of pages. So using good link text helps
everyone!

ARIA
Imagine the following page:
Product Description Order
Widget Description Order
Super widget Description Order
In this example, duplicating the text of description and order make sense for someone using a
browser. However, someone using a screen reader would only hear the words description and order
repeated without context.
To support these types of scenarios, HTML supports a set of attributes known as Accessible Rich
Internet Applications (ARIA). These attributes allow you to provide additional information to screen
readers.

NOTE: Like many aspects of HTML, browser and screen reader support may vary. However,
most mainline clients support ARIA attributes.

You can use aria-label to describe the link when the format of the page doesn't allow you to.
The description for widget could be set as
html

<a href="#" aria-label="Widget description">description</a>

✅ In general, using Semantic markup as described above supersedes the use of ARIA, but
sometimes there is no semantic equivalent for various HTML widgets. A good example is a Tree.
There's no HTML equivalent for a tree, so you identify the generic <div> for this element with a
proper role and aria values. The MDN documentation on ARIA contains more useful information.
html

<h2 id="tree-label">File Viewer</h2>

<div role="tree" aria-labelledby="tree-label">
<div role="treeitem" aria-expanded="false" tabindex="0">Uploads</div>
</div>

Images
It goes without saying screen readers are unable to automatically read what's in an image. Ensuring
images are accessible doesn't take much work - it's what the alt attribute is all about. All
meaningful images should have an alt to describe what they are. Images that are purely
decorative should have their alt attribute set to an empty string: alt="" . This prevents screen
readers from unnecessarily announcing the decorative image.
✅ As you might expect, search engines are also unable to understand what's in an image. They also
use alt text. So once again, ensuring your page is accessible provides additional bonuses!

The keyboard
Some users are unable to use a mouse or trackpad, instead relying on keyboard interactions to tab
from one element to the next. It's important for your web site to present your content in logical order
so a keyboard user can access each interactive element as they move down a document. If you build
your web pages with semantic markup and use CSS to style their visual layout, your site should be
keyboard-navigable, but it's important to test this aspect manually. Learn more about keyboard
navigation strategies.
✅ Go to any web site and try to navigate through it using only your keyboard. What works, what
doesn't work? Why?

Summary
A web accessible to some is not a truly 'world-wide web'. The best way to ensure the sites you create
are accessible is to incorporate accessibility best practices from the start. While there are extra steps
involved, incorporating these skills into your workflow now will mean all pages you create will be
accessible.

🚀 Challenge
Take this HTML and rewrite it to be as accessible as possible, given the strategies you learned.
html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>
Example
</title>
<link href='../assets/style.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
</head>
<body>
<div class="site-header">
<p class="site-title">Turtle Ipsum</p>
<p class="site-subtitle">The World's Premier Turtle Fan Club</p>
</div>
<div class="main-nav">
<p class="nav-header">Resources</p>
<div class="nav-list">
<p class="nav-item nav-item-bull"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/
<p class="nav-item nav-item-bull"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org
<p class="nav-item nav-item-bull"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org
</div>
</div>
<div class="main-content">
<div>
<p class="page-title">Welcome to Turtle Ipsum.
<a href="">Click here</a> to learn more.
</p>
<p class="article-text">
Turtle ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do
</p>
</div>
</div>
 <div class="footer">
<div class="footer-section">
<span class="button">Sign up for turtle news</span>
</div><div class="footer-section">
<p class="nav-header footer-title">
Internal Pages
</p>
<div class="nav-list">
<p class="nav-item nav-item-bull"><a href="../">Index</a></p>
<p class="nav-item nav-item-bull"><a href="../semantic">Semantic
</div>
</div>
<p class="footer-copyright">&copy; 2016 Instrument</span>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

Many governments have laws regarding accessibility requirements. Read up on your home country's
accessibility laws. What is covered, and what isn't? An example is this government web site.

Assignment
Analyze a non-accessible web site
Credits: Turtle Ipsum by Instrument

JavaScript Basics: Data Types

 Sketchnote by Tomomi Imura

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz
This lesson covers the basics of JavaScript, the language that provides interactivity on the web.

You can take this lesson on Microsoft Learn!

 🎥 Click the image above for a video about data types

Let's start with variables and the data types that populate them!

Variables
Variables store values that can be used and changed throughout your code.
Creating and declaring a variable has the following syntax [keyword] [name]. It's made up of the two
parts:
Keyword. Keywords can be let or var .
✅ The keyword let was introduced in ES6 and gives your variable a so called block scope. It's
recommended that you use let over var . We will cover block scopes more in depth in future
parts.
The variable name, this is a name you choose yourself.

Task - working with variables

1. Declare a variable. Let's declare a variable using the let keyword:
 javascript

let myVariable;

myVariable has now been declared using the let keyword. It currently doesn't have a
value.
2. Assign a value. Store a value in a variable with the = operator, followed by the expected value.
javascript

myVariable = 123;

Note: the use of = in this lesson means we make use of an "assignment operator", used
to set a value to a variable. It doesn't denote equality.

myVariable has now been initialized with the value 123.

3. Refactor. Replace your code with the following statement.
javascript
let myVariable = 123;

The above is called an explicit initialization when a variable is declared and is assigned a value at
the same time.
4. Change the variable value. Change the variable value in the following way:
javascript

myVariable = 321;

Once a variable is declared, you can change its value at any point in your code with the =
operator and the new value.
✅ Try it! You can write JavaScript right in your browser. Open a browser window and navigate to
Developer Tools. In the console, you will find a prompt; type let myVariable = 123 , press
return, then type myVariable . What happens? Note, you'll learn more about these concepts in
subsequent lessons.

Constants
Declaration and initialization of a constant follows the same concepts as a variable, with the exception
of the const keyword. Constants are typically declared with all uppercase letters.
javascript

const MY_VARIABLE = 123;

Constants are similar to variables, with two exceptions:

Must have a value. Constants must be initialized, or an error will occur when running code.
Reference cannot be changed. The reference of a constant cannot be changed once initialized,
or an error will occur when running code. Let's look at two examples:
Simple value. The following is NOT allowed:
javascript

const PI = 3;
PI = 4; // not allowed

Object reference is protected. The following is NOT allowed.

javascript
const obj = { a: 3 };
obj = { b: 5 } // not allowed

Object value is not protected. The following IS allowed:

javascript

const obj = { a: 3 };
obj.a = 5; // allowed

Above you are changing the value of the object but not the reference itself, which makes it
allowed.

Note, a const means the reference is protected from reassignment. The value is not
immutable though and can change, especially if it's a complex construct like an object.

Data Types
Variables can store many different types of values, like numbers and text. These various types of
values are known as the data type. Data types are an important part of software development
because it helps developers make decisions on how the code should be written and how the software
should run. Furthermore, some data types have unique features that help transform or extract
additional information in a value.
✅ Data Types are also referred to as JavaScript data primitives, as they are the lowest-level data
types that are provided by the language. There are 6 primitive data types: string, number, bigint,
boolean, undefined, and symbol. Take a minute to visualize what each of these primitives might
represent. What is a zebra ? How about 0 ? true ?

Numbers
In the previous section, the value of myVariable was a number data type.
let myVariable = 123;

Variables can store all types of numbers, including decimals or negative numbers. Numbers also can
be used with arithmetic operators, covered in the next section.

Arithmetic Operators
There are several types of operators to use when performing arithmetic functions, and some are
listed here:
Symbol Description Example
Addition: Calculates the sum of two
+
numbers 1 + 2 //expected answer is 3

Subtraction: Calculates the difference of

-
two numbers 1 - 2 //expected answer is -1

Multiplication: Calculates the product of

*
two numbers 1 * 2 //expected answer is 2

Division: Calculates the quotient of two

/
numbers 1 / 2 //expected answer is 0.5

Remainder: Calculates the remainder from

%
the division of two numbers 1 % 2 //expected answer is 1
✅ Try it! Try an arithmetic operation in your browser's console. Do the results surprise you?

Strings
Strings are sets of characters that reside between single or double quotes.
'This is a string'
"This is also a string"
let myString = 'This is a string value stored in a variable';

Remember to use quotes when writing a string, or else JavaScript will assume it's a variable name.

Formatting Strings
Strings are textual, and will require formatting from time to time.
To concatenate two or more strings, or join them together, use the + operator.
javascript

let myString1 = "Hello";

let myString2 = "World";

myString1 + myString2 + "!"; //HelloWorld!

myString1 + " " + myString2 + "!"; //Hello World!
myString1 + ", " + myString2 + "!"; //Hello, World!

✅ Why does 1 + 1 = 2 in JavaScript, but '1' + '1' = 11? Think about it. What about
'1' + 1 ?

Template literals are another way to format strings, except instead of quotes, the backtick is used.
Anything that is not plain text must be placed inside placeholders ${ } . This includes any variables
that may be strings.
javascript

let myString1 = "Hello";

let myString2 = "World";

`${myString1} ${myString2}!` //Hello World!

`${myString1}, ${myString2}!` //Hello, World!

You can achieve your formatting goals with either method, but template literals will respect any
spaces and line breaks.
✅ When would you use a template literal vs. a plain string?

Booleans
Booleans can be only two values: true or false . Booleans can help make decisions on which
lines of code should run when certain conditions are met. In many cases, operators assist with setting
the value of a Boolean and you will often notice and write variables being initialized or their values
being updated with an operator.
let myTrueBool = true
let myFalseBool = false

✅ A variable can be considered 'truthy' if it evaluates to a boolean true . Interestingly, in

JavaScript, all values are truthy unless defined as falsy.

🚀 Challenge
JavaScript is notorious for its surprising ways of handling datatypes on occasion. Do a bit of research
on these 'gotchas'. For example: case sensitivity can bite! Try this in your console:
let age = 1; let Age = 2; age == Age (resolves false -- why?). What other gotchas
can you find?

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

Take a look at this list of JavaScript exercises and try one. What did you learn?

Assignment
Data Types Practice
JavaScript Basics: Methods and Functions

Sketchnote by Tomomi Imura

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz
When we think about writing code, we always want to ensure our code is readable. While this sounds
counterintuitive, code is read many more times than it's written. One core tool in a developer's
toolbox to ensure maintainable code is the function.
 🎥 Click the image above for a video about methods and functions.

You can take this lesson on Microsoft Learn!

Functions
At its core, a function is a block of code we can execute on demand. This is perfect for scenarios
where we need to perform the same task multiple times; rather than duplicating the logic in multiple
locations (which would make it hard to update when the time comes), we can centralize it in one
location, and call it whenever we need the operation performed - you can even call functions from
other functions!.
Just as important is the ability to name a function. While this might seem trivial, the name provides a
quick way of documenting a section of code. You could think of this as a label on a button. If I click on
a button which reads "Cancel timer", I know it's going to stop running the clock.

Creating and calling a function

The syntax for a function looks like the following:
 javascript

function nameOfFunction() { // function definition

// function definition/body
}

If I wanted to create a function to display a greeting, it might look like this:

javascript

function displayGreeting() {
console.log('Hello, world!');
}

Whenever we want to call (or invoke) our function, we use the name of the function followed by () .
It's worth noting the fact our function can be defined before or after we decide to call it; the
JavaScript compiler will find it for you.
javascript
// calling our function
displayGreeting();

NOTE: There is a special type of function known as a method, which you've already been
using! In fact, we saw this in our demo above when we used console.log . What makes a
method different from a function is a method is attached to an object ( console in our
example), while a function is free floating. You will hear many developers use these terms
interchangeably.

Function best practices

There are a handful of best practices to keep in mind when creating functions
As always, use descriptive names so you know what the function will do
Use camelCasing to combine words
Keep your functions focused on a specific task

Passing information to a function

To make a function more reusable you'll often want to pass information into it. If we consider our
displayGreeting example above, it will only display Hello, world!. Not the most useful function
one could create. If we want to make it a little more flexible, like allowing someone to specify the
name of the person to greet, we can add a parameter. A parameter (also sometimes called an
argument), is additional information sent to a function.
Parameters are listed in the definition part within parenthesis and are comma separated like so:
javascript

function name(param, param2, param3) {

We can update our displayGreeting to accept a name and have that displayed.
javascript

function displayGreeting(name) {
const message = `Hello, ${name}!`;
console.log(message);
}

When we want to call our function and pass in the parameter, we specify it in the parenthesis.
javascript

displayGreeting('Christopher');
// displays "Hello, Christopher!" when run

Default values
We can make our function even more flexible by adding more parameters. But what if we don't want
to require every value be specified? Keeping with our greeting example, we could leave name as
required (we need to know who we're greeting), but we want to allow the greeting itself to be
customized as desired. If someone doesn't want to customize it, we provide a default value instead.
To provide a default value to a parameter, we set it much in the same way we set a value for a variable
- parameterName = 'defaultValue' . To see a full example:
javascript

function displayGreeting(name, salutation='Hello') {

console.log(`${salutation}, ${name}`);
}
When we call the function, we can then decide if we want to set a value for salutation .
javascript

displayGreeting('Christopher');
// displays "Hello, Christopher"

displayGreeting('Christopher', 'Hi');
// displays "Hi, Christopher"

Return values
Up until now the function we built will always output to the console. Sometimes this can be exactly
what we're looking for, especially when we create functions which will be calling other services. But
what if I want to create a helper function to perform a calculation and provide the value back so I can
use it elsewhere?
We can do this by using a return value. A return value is returned by the function, and can be stored
in a variable just the same as we could store a literal value such as a string or number.
If a function does return something then the keyword return is used. The return keyword
expects a value or reference of what's being returned like so:
javascript

return myVariable;

We could create a function to create a greeting message and return the value back to the caller
javascript
function createGreetingMessage(name) {
const message = `Hello, ${name}`;
return message;
}

When calling this function we'll store the value in a variable. This is much the same way we'd set a
variable to a static value (like const name = 'Christopher' ).
javascript

const greetingMessage = createGreetingMessage('Christopher');

Functions as parameters for functions
As you progress in your programming career, you will come across functions which accept functions
as parameters. This neat trick is commonly used when we don't know when something is going to
occur or complete, but we know we need to perform an operation in response.
As an example, consider setTimeout, which begins a timer and will execute code when it completes.
We need to tell it what code we want to execute. Sounds like a perfect job for a function!
If you run the code below, after 3 seconds you'll see the message 3 seconds has elapsed.
javascript

function displayDone() {
console.log('3 seconds has elapsed');
}
// timer value is in milliseconds
setTimeout(displayDone, 3000);

Anonymous functions
Let's take another look at what we've built. We're creating a function with a name which will be used
one time. As our application gets more complex, we can see ourselves creating a lot of functions
which will only be called once. This isn't ideal. As it turns out, we don't always need to provide a
name!
When we are passing a function as a parameter we can bypass creating one in advance and instead
build one as part of the parameter. We use the same function keyword, but instead we build it as
a parameter.
Let's rewrite the code above to use an anonymous function:
javascript

setTimeout(function() {
console.log('3 seconds has elapsed');
}, 3000);

If you run our new code you'll notice we get the same results. We've created a function, but didn't
have to give it a name!

Fat arrow functions

One shortcut common in a lot of programming languages (including JavaScript) is the ability to use
what's called an arrow or fat arrow function. It uses a special indicator of => , which looks like an
arrow - thus the name! By using => , we are able to skip the function keyword.
Let's rewrite our code one more time to use a fat arrow function:
javascript

setTimeout(() => {
console.log('3 seconds has elapsed');
}, 3000);

When to use each strategy

You've now seen we have three ways to pass a function as a parameter and might be wondering
when to use each. If you know you'll be using the function more than once, create it as normal. If
you'll be using it for just the one location, it's generally best to use an anonymous function. Whether
or not you use a fat arrow function or the more traditional function syntax is up to you, but you
will notice most modern developers prefer => .

🚀 Challenge
Can you articulate in one sentence the difference between functions and methods? Give it a try!

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

It's worth reading up a little more on arrow functions, as they are increasingly used in code bases.
Practice writing a function, and then rewriting it with this syntax.

Assignment
Fun with Functions

JavaScript Basics: Making Decisions

Sketchnote by Tomomi Imura

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz
Making decisions and controlling the order in which your code runs makes your code reusable and
robust. This section covers the syntax for controlling data flow in JavaScript and its significance when
used with Boolean data types
 🎥 Click the image above for a video about making decisions.

You can take this lesson on Microsoft Learn!

A Brief Recap on Booleans

Booleans can be only two values: true or false . Booleans help make decisions on which lines
of code should run when certain conditions are met.
Set your boolean to be true or false like this:
let myTrueBool = true let myFalseBool = false

✅ Booleans are named after the English mathematician, philosopher and logician George Boole
(1815–1864).

Comparison Operators and Booleans

Operators are used to evaluate conditions by making comparisons that will create a Boolean value.
The following is a list of operators that are frequently used.
 Symbol Description Example
Less than: Compares two values and returns the true
< Boolean data type if the value on the left side is less than the 5 < 6 // true
right
Less than or equal to: Compares two values and returns the
<= true Boolean data type if the value on the left side is less 5 <= 6 // true
than or equal to the right
Greater than: Compares two values and returns the true
> Boolean data type if the value on the left side is larger than the 5 > 6 // false
right
Greater than or equal to: Compares two values and returns
>= the true Boolean data type if the value on the left side is 5 >= 6 // false
larger than or equal to the right
Strict equality: Compares two values and returns the true
=== Boolean data type if values on the right and left are equal AND 5 === 6 // false
are the same data type.
Inequality: Compares two values and returns the opposite
!==
Boolean value of what a strict equality operator would return 5 !== 6 // true

✅ Check your knowledge by writing some comparisons in your browser's console. Does any
returned data surprise you?

If Statement
The if statement will run code in between its blocks if the condition is true.
javascript

if (condition){
//Condition was true. Code in this block will run.
}

Logical operators are often used to form the condition.

 javascript

let currentMoney;
let laptopPrice;

if (currentMoney >= laptopPrice){

//Condition was true. Code in this block will run.
console.log("Getting a new laptop!");
}

IF..Else Statement
The else statement will run the code in between its blocks when the condition is false. It's optional
with an if statement.
javascript

let currentMoney;
let laptopPrice;

if (currentMoney >= laptopPrice){

//Condition was true. Code in this block will run.
console.log("Getting a new laptop!");
}
else{
//Condition was false. Code in this block will run.
console.log("Can't afford a new laptop, yet!");
}

✅ Test your understanding of this code and the following code by running it in a browser console.
Change the values of the currentMoney and laptopPrice variables to change the returned
console.log() .

Logical Operators and Booleans

Decisions might require more than one comparison, and can be strung together with logical
operators to produce a Boolean value.
Symbol Description Example
 Symbol Description Example
Logical
AND:
Compares
two Boolean
&& expressions. (5 > 6) && (5 < 6 ) //One side is false, other is true.
Returns true
only if both
sides are
true
Logical OR:
Compares
two Boolean
expressions.
||
Returns true (5 > 6) || (5 < 6) //One side is false, other is true. R

if at least
one side is
true
Logical
NOT:
Returns the
! opposite !(5 > 6) // 5 is not greater than 6, but "!" will return
value of a
Boolean
expression

Conditions and Decisions with Logical Operators

Logical operators can be used to form conditions in if..else statements.
javascript

let currentMoney;
let laptopPrice;
let laptopDiscountPrice = laptopPrice - (laptopPrice * .20) //Laptop price

if (currentMoney >= laptopPrice || currentMoney >= laptopDiscountPrice){

 //Condition was true. Code in this block will run.
console.log("Getting a new laptop!");
}
else {
//Condition was true. Code in this block will run.
console.log("Can't afford a new laptop, yet!");
}

Negation operator
You've seen so far how if you can use an if...else statement to create conditional logic.
Anything that goes into an if needs to evaluate to true/false. By using the ! operator you can
negate the expression. It would look like so:
javascript
if (!condition) {
// runs if condition is false
} else {
// runs if condition is true
}

Ternary expressions
if...else isn't the only way to express decision logic. You can also use something called a
ternary operator. The syntax for it looks like this:
javascript

let variable = condition ? <return this if true> : <return this if false>

Below is a more tangible example:

javascript

let firstNumber = 20;

let secondNumber = 10
let biggestNumber = firstNumber > secondNumber ? firstNumber: secondNumber;

✅ Take a minute to read this code a few times. Do you understand how these operators are
working?
The above states that
 if firstNumber is larger than secondNumber
then assign firstNumber to biggestNumber
else assign secondNumber .
The ternary expression is just a compact way of writing the code below:
javascript

let biggestNumber;
if (firstNumber > secondNumber) {
biggestNumber = firstNumber;
} else {
biggestNumber = secondNumber;
}

🚀 Challenge
Create a program that is written first with logical operators, and then rewrite it using a ternary
expression. What's your preferred syntax?

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

Read more about the many operators available to the user on MDN.
Go through Josh Comeau's wonderful operator lookup!

Assignment
Operators

JavaScript Basics: Arrays and Loops

Sketchnote by Tomomi Imura

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz
This lesson covers the basics of JavaScript, the language that provides interactivity on the web. In
this lesson, you'll learn about arrays and loops, which are used to manipulate data.
 🎥 Click the image above for a video about arrays and loops.

You can take this lesson on Microsoft Learn!

Arrays
Working with data is a common task for any language, and it's a much easier task when data is
organized in a structural format, such as arrays. With arrays, data is stored in a structure similar to a
list. One major benefit of arrays is that you can store different types of data in one array.
✅ Arrays are all around us! Can you think of a real-life example of an array, such as a solar panel
array?
The syntax for an array is a pair of square brackets.
javascript

let myArray = [];

This is an empty array, but arrays can be declared already populated with data. Multiple values in an
array are separated by a comma.
javascript

let iceCreamFlavors = ["Chocolate", "Strawberry", "Vanilla", "Pistachio", "

The array values are assigned a unique value called the index, a whole number that is assigned based
on its distance from the beginning of the array. In the example above, the string value "Chocolate"
has an index of 0, and the index of "Rocky Road" is 4. Use the index with square brackets to retrieve,
change, or insert array values.
✅ Does it surprise you that arrays start at the zero index? In some programming languages, indexes
start at 1. There's an interesting history around this, which you can read on Wikipedia.
javascript

let iceCreamFlavors = ["Chocolate", "Strawberry", "Vanilla", "Pistachio", "

iceCreamFlavors[2]; //"Vanilla"

You can leverage the index to change a value, like this:

javascript

iceCreamFlavors[4] = "Butter Pecan"; //Changed "Rocky Road" to "Butter Peca

And you can insert a new value at a given index like this:
javascript
iceCreamFlavors[5] = "Cookie Dough"; //Added "Cookie Dough"

✅ A more common way to push values to an array is by using array operators such as array.push()
To find out how many items are in an array, use the length property.
 javascript

let iceCreamFlavors = ["Chocolate", "Strawberry", "Vanilla", "Pistachio", "

iceCreamFlavors.length; //5

✅ Try it yourself! Use your browser's console to create and manipulate an array of your own
creation.

Loops
Loops allow for repetitive or iterative tasks, and can save a lot of time and code. Each iteration can
vary in their variables, values, and conditions. There are different types of loops in JavaScript, and
they have small differences, but essentially do the same thing: loop over data.

For Loop
The for loop requires 3 parts to iterate: - counter A variable that is typically initialized with a
number that counts the number of iterations. - condition Expression that uses comparison
operators to cause the loop to stop when true - iteration-expression Runs at the end of
each iteration, typically used to change the counter value
javascript

// Counting up to 10
for (let i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
console.log(i);
}

✅ Run this code in a browser console. What happens when you make small changes to the counter,
condition, or iteration expression? Can you make it run backwards, creating a countdown?

While loop
Unlike the syntax for the for loop, while loops only require a condition that will stop the loop
when true . Conditions in loops usually rely on other values like counters, and must be managed
during the loop. Starting values for counters must be created outside the loop, and any expressions
to meet a condition, including changing the counter must be maintained inside the loop.
javascript
//Counting up to 10
let i = 0;
 while (i < 10) {
console.log(i);
i++;
}

✅ Why would you choose a for loop vs. a while loop? 17K viewers had the same question on
StackOverflow, and some of the opinions might be interesting to you.

Loops and Arrays

Arrays are often used with loops because most conditions require the length of the array to stop the
loop, and the index can also be the counter value.
javascript

let iceCreamFlavors = ["Chocolate", "Strawberry", "Vanilla", "Pistachio", "

for (let i = 0; i < iceCreamFlavors.length; i++) {

console.log(iceCreamFlavors[i]);
} //Ends when all flavors are printed

✅ Experiment with looping over an array of your own making in your browser's console.

🚀 Challenge
There are other ways of looping over arrays other than for and while loops. There are forEach, for-of,
and map. Rewrite your array loop using one of these techniques.

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

Arrays in JavaScript have many methods attached to them, extremely useful for data manipulation.
Read up on these methods and try some of them out (like push, pop, slice and splice) on an array of
your creation.

Assignment
Loop an Array

Terrarium Project Part 1: Introduction to

HTML

Sketchnote by Tomomi Imura

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz

Introduction
HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is the 'skeleton' of the web. If CSS 'dresses up' your HTML
and JavaScript brings it to life, HTML is the body of your web application. HTML's syntax even
reflects that idea, as it includes "head", "body", and "footer" tags.
In this lesson, we're going to use HTML to layout the 'skeleton' of our virtual terrarium's interface. It
will have a title and three columns: a right and a left column where the draggable plants live, and a
center area that will be the actual glass-looking terrarium. By the end of this lesson, you will be able
to see the plants in the columns, but the interface will look a little strange; don't worry, in the next
section you will add CSS styles to the interface to make it look better.

Task
On your computer, create a folder called 'terrarium' and inside it, a file called 'index.html'. You can do
this in Visual Studio Code after you create your terrarium folder by opening a new VS Code window,
clicking 'open folder', and navigating to your new folder. Click the small 'file' button in the Explorer
pane and create the new file:
Or
Use these commands on your git bash:
mkdir terrarium
cd terrarium
touch index.html
code index.html or nano index.html

index.html files indicate to a browser that it is the default file in a folder; URLs such as
https://anysite.com/test might be built using a folder structure including a folder
called test with index.html inside it; index.html doesn't have to show in a URL.

The DocType and html tags

The first line of an HTML file is its doctype. It's a little surprising that you need to have this line at the
very top of the file, but it tells older browsers that the browser needs to render the page in a standard
mode, following the current html specification.

Tip: in VS Code, you can hover over a tag and get information about its use from the MDN
Reference guides.

The second line should be the <html> tag's opening tag, followed right now by its closing tag
</html> . These tags are the root elements of your interface.

Task
Add these lines at the top of your index.html file:
HTML

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html></html>
✅ There are a few different modes that can be determined by setting the DocType with a query
string: Quirks Mode and Standards Mode. These modes used to support really old browsers that
aren't normally used nowadays (Netscape Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer 5). You can stick to the
standard doctype declaration.

The document's 'head'

The 'head' area of the HTML document includes crucial information about your web page, also
known as metadata. In our case, we tell the web server to which this page will be sent to be rendered,
these four things:
the page's title
page metadata including:
the 'character set', telling about what character encoding is used in the page
browser information, including x-ua-compatible which indicates that the IE=edge
browser is supported
information about how the viewport should behave when it is loaded. Setting the viewport to
have an initial scale of 1 controls the zoom level when the page is first loaded.

Task
Add a 'head' block to your document in between the opening and closing <html> tags.
html

<head>
<title>Welcome to my Virtual Terrarium</title>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
</head>

✅ What would happen if you set a viewport meta tag like this:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=600"> ? Read more about the viewport.

The document's body

HTML Tags
In HTML, you add tags to your .html file to create elements of a web page. Each tag usually has an
opening and closing tag, like this: <p>hello</p> to indicate a paragraph. Create your interface's
body by adding a set of <body> tags inside the <html> tag pair; your markup now looks like
this:

Task
html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to my Virtual Terrarium</title>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"
</head>
<body></body>
</html>

Now, you can start building out your page. Normally, you use <div> tags to create the separate
elements in a page. We'll create a series of <div> elements which will contain images.

Images
One html tag that doesn't need a closing tag is the <img> tag, because it has a src element that
contains all the information the page needs to render the item.
Create a folder in your app called images and in that, add all the images in the source code folder;
(there are 14 images of plants).

Task
Add those plant images into two columns between the <body></body> tags:
html

<div id="page">
<div id="left-container" class="container">
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant1" src="./images/plant1
 </div>
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant2" src="./images/plant2
</div>
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant3" src="./images/plant3
</div>
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant4" src="./images/plant4
</div>
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant5" src="./images/plant5
</div>
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant6" src="./images/plant6
</div>
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant7" src="./images/plant7
</div>
</div>
<div id="right-container" class="container">
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant8" src="./images/plant8
</div>
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant9" src="./images/plant9
</div>
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant10" src="./images/plant
</div>
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant11" src="./images/plant
</div>
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant12" src="./images/plant
</div>
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant13" src="./images/plant
</div>
<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant14" src="./images/plant
</div>
</div>
</div>
 Note: Spans vs. Divs. Divs are considered 'block' elements, and Spans are 'inline'. What would
happen if you transformed these divs to spans?

With this markup, the plants now show up on the screen. It looks pretty bad, because they aren't yet
styled using CSS, and we'll do that in the next lesson.
Each image has alt text that will appear even if you can't see or render an image. This is an important
attribute to include for accessibility. Learn more about accessibility in future lessons; for now,
remember that the alt attribute provides alternative information for an image if a user for some reason
cannot view it (because of slow connection, an error in the src attribute, or if the user uses a screen
reader).
✅ Did you notice that each image has the same alt tag? Is this good practice? Why or why not? Can
you improve this code?

Semantic markup
In general, it's preferable to use meaningful 'semantics' when writing HTML. What does that mean? It
means that you use HTML tags to represent the type of data or interaction they were designed for.
For example, the main title text on a page should use an <h1> tag.
Add the following line right below your opening <body> tag:
html
<h1>My Terrarium</h1>

Using semantic markup such as having headers be <h1> and unordered lists be rendered as
<ul> helps screen readers navigate through a page. In general, buttons should be written as
<button> and lists should be <li> . While it's possible to use specially styled <span>
elements with click handlers to mock buttons, it's better for disabled users to use technologies to
determine where on a page a button resides, and to interact with it, if the element appears as a
button. For this reason, try to use semantic markup as much as possible.
✅ Take a look at a screen reader and how it interacts with a web page. Can you see why having non
semantic markup might frustrate the user?
The terrarium
The last part of this interface involves creating markup that will be styled to create a terrarium.

Task:
Add this markup above the last </div> tag:
html

<div id="terrarium">
<div class="jar-top"></div>
<div class="jar-walls">
<div class="jar-glossy-long"></div>
<div class="jar-glossy-short"></div>
</div>
<div class="dirt"></div>
<div class="jar-bottom"></div>
</div>

✅ Even though you added this markup to the screen, you see absolutely nothing render. Why?

🚀Challenge
There are some wild 'older' tags in HTML that are still fun to play with, though you shouldn't use
deprecated tags such as these tags in your markup. Still, can you use the old <marquee> tag to
make the h1 title scroll horizontally? (if you do, don't forget to remove it afterwards)

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

HTML is the 'tried and true' building block system that has helped build the web into what it is today.
Learn a little about its history by studying some old and new tags. Can you figure out why some tags
were deprecated and some added? What tags might be introduced in the future?
Learn more about building sites for the web and mobile devices at Microsoft Learn.

Assignment
Practice your HTML: Build a blog mockup

Terrarium Project Part 2: Introduction to

CSS

Sketchnote by Tomomi Imura

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz

Introduction
CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, solve an important problem of web development: how to make your
web site look nice. Styling your apps makes them more usable and nicer-looking; you can also use
CSS to create Responsive Web Design (RWD) - allowing your apps to look good no matter what
screen size they are displayed on. CSS is not only about making your app look nice; its spec includes
animations and transforms that can enable sophisticated interactions for your apps. The CSS
Working Group helps maintain current CSS specifications; you can follow their work at World Wide
Web Consortium's site.

Note, CSS is a language that evolves, like everything on the web, and not all browsers support
newer parts of the specification. Always check your implementations by consulting
CanIUse.com.

In this lesson, we're going to add styles to our online terrarium and learn more about several CSS
concepts: the cascade, inheritance, and the use of selectors, positioning, and using CSS to build
layouts. In the process we will layout the terrarium and create the actual terrarium itself.

Prerequisite
You should have the HTML for your terrarium built and ready to be styled.

Task
In your terrarium folder, create a new file called style.css . Import that file in the <head>
section:
html

<link rel="stylesheet" href="./style.css" />

The Cascade
Cascading Style Sheets incorporate the idea that the styles 'cascade' such that the application of a
style is guided by its priority. Styles set by a web site author take priority over those set by a browser.
Styles set 'inline' take priority over those set in an external style sheet.

Task
Add the inline style "color: red" to your <h1> tag:
HTML

<h1 style="color: red">My Terrarium</h1>

Then, add the following code to your style.css file:

CSS

h1 {
color: blue;
}

✅ Which color displays in your web app? Why? Can you find a way to override styles? When would
you want to do this, or why not?

Inheritance
Styles are inherited from an ancestor style to a descendent, such that nested elements inherit the
styles of their parents.

Task
Set the body's font to a given font, and check to see a nested element's font:
CSS

body {
font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
}
Open your browser's console to the 'Elements' tab and observe the H1's font. It inherits its font from
the body, as stated within the browser:

✅ Can you make a nested style inherit a different property?

CSS Selectors
Tags
So far, your style.css file has only a few tags styled, and the app looks pretty strange:
CSS

body {
font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
}

h1 {
color: #3a241d;
text-align: center;
}

This way of styling a tag gives you control over unique elements, but you need to control the styles of
many plants in your terrarium. To do that, you need to leverage CSS selectors.

Ids
Add some style to layout the left and right containers. Since there is only one left container and only
one right container, they are given ids in the markup. To style them, use # :
CSS

#left-container {
background-color: #eee;
width: 15%;
left: 0px;
top: 0px;
position: absolute;
 height: 100%;
padding: 10px;
}

#right-container {
background-color: #eee;
width: 15%;
right: 0px;
top: 0px;
position: absolute;
height: 100%;
padding: 10px;
}

Here, you have placed these containers with absolute positioning to the far left and right of the
screen, and used percentages for their width so that they can scale for small mobile screens.
✅ This code is quite repeated, thus not "DRY" (Don't Repeat Yourself); can you find a better way to
style these ids, perhaps with an id and a class? You would need to change the markup and refactor
the CSS:
html
<div id="left-container" class="container"></div>

Classes
In the example above, you styled two unique elements on the screen. If you want styles to apply to
many elements on the screen, you can use CSS classes. Do this to layout the plants in the left and
right containers.
Notice that each plant in the HTML markup has a combination of ids and classes. The ids here are
used by the JavaScript that you will add later to manipulate the terrarium plant placement. The
classes, however, give all the plants a given style.
html

<div class="plant-holder">
<img class="plant" alt="plant" id="plant1" src="./images/plant1.png" />
</div>

Add the following to your style.css file:

 CSS

.plant-holder {
position: relative;
height: 13%;
left: -10px;
}

.plant {
position: absolute;
max-width: 150%;
max-height: 150%;
z-index: 2;
}

Notable in this snippet is the mixture of relative and absolute positioning, which we'll cover in the next
section. Take a look at the way heights are handled by percentages:
You set the height of the plant holder to 13%, a good number to ensure that all the plants are
displayed in each vertical container without need for scrolling.
You set the plant holder to move to the left to allow the plants to be more centered within their
container. The images have a large amount of transparent background so as to make them more
draggable, so need to be pushed to the left to fit better on the screen.
Then, the plant itself is given a max-width of 150%. This allows it to scale down as the browser scales
down. Try resizing your browser; the plants stay in their containers but scale down to fit.
Also notable is the use of z-index, which controls the relative altitude of an element (so that the plants
sit on top of the container and appear to sit inside the terrarium).
✅ Why do you need both a plant holder and a plant CSS selector?

CSS Positioning
Mixing position properties (there are static, relative, fixed, absolute, and sticky positions) can be a
little tricky, but when done properly it gives you good control over the elements on your pages.
Absolute positioned elements are positioned relative to their nearest positioned ancestors, and if
there are none, it is positioned according to the document body.
Relative positioned elements are positioned based on the CSS's directions to adjust its placement
away from its initial position.
In our sample, the plant-holder is a relative-positioned element that is positioned within an
absolute-positioned container. The resultant behavior is that the side bar containers are pinned left
and right, and the plant-holder is nested, adjusting itself within the side bars, giving space for the
plants to be placed in a vertical row.

The plant itself also has absolute positioning, necessary to making it draggable, as you
will discover in the next lesson.

✅ Experiment with switching the types of positioning of the side containers and the plant-holder.
What happens?

CSS Layouts
Now you will use what you learned to build the terrarium itself, all using CSS!
First, style the .terrarium div children as a rounded rectangle using CSS:
CSS

.jar-walls {
height: 80%;
width: 60%;
background: #d1e1df;
border-radius: 1rem;
position: absolute;
bottom: 0.5%;
left: 20%;
opacity: 0.5;
z-index: 1;
}

.jar-top {
width: 50%;
height: 5%;
background: #d1e1df;
position: absolute;
bottom: 80.5%;
left: 25%;
opacity: 0.7;
z-index: 1;
}
 .jar-bottom {
width: 50%;
height: 1%;
background: #d1e1df;
position: absolute;
bottom: 0%;
left: 25%;
opacity: 0.7;
}

.dirt {
width: 60%;
height: 5%;
background: #3a241d;
position: absolute;
border-radius: 0 0 1rem 1rem;
bottom: 1%;
left: 20%;
opacity: 0.7;
z-index: -1;
}

Note the use of percentages here. If you scale your browser down, you can see how the jar scales as
well. Also notice the widths and height percentages for the jar elements and how each element is
absolutely positioned in the center, pinned to the bottom of the viewport.
We are also using rem for the border-radius, a font-relative length. Read more about this type of
relative measurement in the CSS spec.
✅ Try changing the jar colors and opacity vs. those of the dirt. What happens? Why?

🚀Challenge
Add a 'bubble' shine to the left bottom area of the jar to make it look more glasslike. You will be
styling the .jar-glossy-long and .jar-glossy-short to look like a reflected shine. Here's
how it would look:
To complete the post-lecture quiz, go through this Learn module: Style your HTML app with CSS

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

CSS seems deceptively straightforward, but there are many challenges when trying to style an app
perfectly for all browsers and all screen sizes. CSS-Grid and Flexbox are tools that have been
developed to make the job a little more structured and more reliable. Learn about these tools by
playing Flexbox Froggy and Grid Garden.
Assignment
CSS Refactoring

Terrarium Project Part 3: DOM

Manipulation and a Closure

Sketchnote by Tomomi Imura

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz
Introduction
Manipulating the DOM, or the "Document Object Model", is a key aspect of web development.
According to MDN, "The Document Object Model (DOM) is the data representation of the objects
that comprise the structure and content of a document on the web." The challenges around DOM
manipulation on the web have often been the impetus behind using JavaScript frameworks instead of
vanilla JavaScript to manage the DOM, but we will manage on our own!
In addition, this lesson will introduce the idea of a JavaScript closure, which you can think of as a
function enclosed by another function so that the inner function has access to the outer function's
scope.

JavaScript closures are a vast and complex topic. This lesson touches on the most basic idea
that in this terrarium's code, you will find a closure: an inner function and an outer function
constructed in a way to allow the inner function access to the outer function's scope. For
much more information on how this works, please visit the extensive documentation.

We will use a closure to manipulate the DOM.

Think of the DOM as a tree, representing all the ways that a web page document can be manipulated.
Various APIs (Application Program Interfaces) have been written so that programmers, using their
programming language of choice, can access the DOM and edit, change, rearrange, and otherwise
manage it.

A representation of the DOM and the HTML markup that references it. From Olfa Nasraoui
In this lesson, we will complete our interactive terrarium project by creating the JavaScript that will
allow a user to manipulate the plants on the page.

Prerequisite
You should have the HTML and CSS for your terrarium built. By the end of this lesson you will be able
to move the plants into and out of the terrarium by dragging them.

Task
In your terrarium folder, create a new file called script.js . Import that file in the <head>
section:
html

<script src="./script.js" defer></script>

Note: use defer when importing an external JavaScript file into the html file so as to allow
the JavaScript to execute only after the HTML file has been fully loaded. You could also use
the async attribute, which allows the script to execute while the HTML file is parsing, but in
our case, it's important to have the HTML elements fully available for dragging before we
allow the drag script to be executed.

The DOM elements

The first thing you need to do is to create references to the elements that you want to manipulate in
the DOM. In our case, they are the 14 plants currently waiting in the side bars.

Task
html

dragElement(document.getElementById('plant1'));
dragElement(document.getElementById('plant2'));
dragElement(document.getElementById('plant3'));
 dragElement(document.getElementById('plant4'));
dragElement(document.getElementById('plant5'));
dragElement(document.getElementById('plant6'));
dragElement(document.getElementById('plant7'));
dragElement(document.getElementById('plant8'));
dragElement(document.getElementById('plant9'));
dragElement(document.getElementById('plant10'));
dragElement(document.getElementById('plant11'));
dragElement(document.getElementById('plant12'));
dragElement(document.getElementById('plant13'));
dragElement(document.getElementById('plant14'));

What's going on here? You are referencing the document and looking through its DOM to find an
element with a particular Id. Remember in the first lesson on HTML that you gave individual Ids to
each plant image ( id="plant1" )? Now you will make use of that effort. After identifying each
element, you pass that item to a function called dragElement that you'll build in a minute. Thus,
the element in the HTML is now drag-enabled, or will be shortly.
✅ Why do we reference elements by Id? Why not by their CSS class? You might refer to the previous
lesson on CSS to answer this question.

The Closure
Now you are ready to create the dragElement closure, which is an outer function that encloses an
inner function or functions (in our case, we will have three).
Closures are useful when one or more functions need to access an outer function's scope. Here's an
example:
javascript
function displayCandy(){
let candy = ['jellybeans'];
function addCandy(candyType) {
candy.push(candyType)
}
addCandy('gumdrops');
}
displayCandy();
console.log(candy)
In this example, the displayCandy function surrounds a function that pushes a new candy type into an
array that already exists in the function. If you were to run this code, the candy array would be
undefined, as it is a local variable (local to the closure).
✅ How can you make the candy array accessible? Try moving it outside the closure. This way, the
array becomes global, rather than remaining only available to the closure's local scope.

Task
Under the element declarations in script.js , create a function:
javascript

function dragElement(terrariumElement) {
//set 4 positions for positioning on the screen
let pos1 = 0,
pos2 = 0,
pos3 = 0,
pos4 = 0;
terrariumElement.onpointerdown = pointerDrag;
}

dragElement get its terrariumElement object from the declarations at the top of the script.
Then, you set some local positions at 0 for the object passed into the function. These are the local
variables that will be manipulated for each element as you add drag and drop functionality within the
closure to each element. The terrarium will be populated by these dragged elements, so the
application needs to keep track of where they are placed.
In addition, the terrariumElement that is passed to this function is assigned a pointerdown event,
which is part of the web APIs designed to help with DOM management. onpointerdown fires
when a button is pushed, or in our case, a draggable element is touched. This event handler works on
both web and mobile browsers, with a few exceptions.
✅ The event handler onclick has much more support cross-browser; why wouldn't you use it
here? Think about the exact type of screen interaction you're trying to create here.

The Pointerdrag function

The terrariumElement is ready to be dragged around; when the onpointerdown event is fired, the
function pointerDrag is invoked. Add that function right under this line:
 terrariumElement.onpointerdown = pointerDrag; :

Task
javascript

function pointerDrag(e) {
e.preventDefault();
console.log(e);
pos3 = e.clientX;
pos4 = e.clientY;
}

Several things happen. First, you prevent the default events that normally happen on pointerdown
from occurring by using e.preventDefault(); . This way you have more control over the
interface's behavior.

Come back to this line when you've built the script file completely and try it without
e.preventDefault() - what happens?

Second, open index.html in a browser window, and inspect the interface. When you click a plant,
you can see how the 'e' event is captured. Dig into the event to see how much information is
gathered by one pointer down event!
Next, note how the local variables pos3 and pos4 are set to e.clientX. You can find the e
values in the inspection pane. These values capture the x and y coordinates of the plant at the
moment you click on it or touch it. You will need fine-grained control over the behavior of the plants
as you click and drag them, so you keep track of their coordinates.
✅ Is it becoming more clear why this entire app is built with one big closure? If it wasn't, how would
you maintain scope for each of the 14 draggable plants?
Complete the initial function by adding two more pointer event manipulations under
pos4 = e.clientY :

html
document.onpointermove = elementDrag;
document.onpointerup = stopElementDrag;

Now you are indicating that you want the plant to be dragged along with the pointer as you move it,
and for the dragging gesture to stop when you deselect the plant. onpointermove and
 onpointerup are all parts of the same API as onpointerdown . The interface will throw errors
now as you have not yet defined the elementDrag and the stopElementDrag functions, so
build those out next.

The elementDrag and stopElementDrag functions

You will complete your closure by adding two more internal functions that will handle what happens
when you drag a plant and stop dragging it. The behavior you want is that you can drag any plant at
any time and place it anywhere on the screen. This interface is quite un-opinionated (there is no drop
zone for example) to allow you to design your terrarium exactly as you like it by adding, removing, and
repositioning plants.

Task
Add the elementDrag function right after the closing curly bracket of pointerDrag :
javascript

function elementDrag(e) {
pos1 = pos3 - e.clientX;
pos2 = pos4 - e.clientY;
pos3 = e.clientX;
pos4 = e.clientY;
console.log(pos1, pos2, pos3, pos4);
terrariumElement.style.top = terrariumElement.offsetTop - pos2 + 'px';
terrariumElement.style.left = terrariumElement.offsetLeft - pos1 + 'px
}

In this function, you do a lot of editing of the initial positions 1-4 that you set as local variables in the
outer function. What's going on here?
As you drag, you reassign pos1 by making it equal to pos3 (which you set earlier as
e.clientX ) minus the current e.clientX value. You do a similar operation to pos2 . Then,
you reset pos3 and pos4 to the new X and Y coordinates of the element. You can watch these
changes in the console as you drag. Then, you manipulate the plant's css style to set its new position
based on the new positions of pos1 and pos2 , calculating the plant's top and left X and Y
coordinates based on comparing its offset with these new positions.

offsetTop and offsetLeft are CSS properties that set an element's position based
on that of its parent; its parent can be any element that is not positioned as static .
All this recalculation of positioning allows you to fine-tune the behavior of the terrarium and its plants.

Task
The final task to complete the interface is to add the stopElementDrag function after the closing
curly bracket of elementDrag :
javascript

function stopElementDrag() {
document.onpointerup = null;
document.onpointermove = null;
}

This small function resets the onpointerup and onpointermove events so that you can either
restart your plant's progress by starting to drag it again, or start dragging a new plant.
✅ What happens if you don't set these events to null?
Now you have completed your project!
🥇 Congratulations! You have finished your beautiful terrarium.
🚀Challenge
Add new event handler to your closure to do something more to the plants; for example, double-click
a plant to bring it to the front. Get creative!

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

While dragging elements around the screen seems trivial, there are many ways to do this and many
pitfalls, depending on the effect you seek. In fact, there is an entire drag and drop API that you can
try. We didn't use it in this module because the effect we wanted was somewhat different, but try this
API on your own project and see what you can achieve.
Find more information on pointer events on the W3C docs and on MDN web docs.
Always check browser capabilities using CanIUse.com.

Assignment
Work a bit more with the DOM

Creating a game using events

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz

Event driven programming

When creating a browser based application, we provide a graphical user interface (GUI) for the user
to use when interacting with what we've built. The most common way to interact with the browser is
through clicking and typing in various elements. The challenge we face as a developer is we don't
know when they're going to perform these operations!
Event-driven programming is the name for the type of programming we need to do to create our GUI.
If we break this phrase down a little bit, we see the core word here is event. Event, according to
Merriam-Webster, is defined as "something which happens". This describes our situation perfectly.
We know something is going to happen for which we want to execute some code in response, but we
don't know when it will take place.
The way we mark a section of code we want to execute is by creating a function. When we think
about procedural programming, functions are called in a specific order. This same thing is going to be
true with event driven programming. The difference is how the functions will be called.
To handle events (button clicking, typing, etc.), we register event listeners. An event listener is a
function which listens for an event to occur and executes in response. Event listeners can update the
UI, make calls to the server, or whatever else needs to be done in response to the user's action. We
add an event listener by using addEventListener, and providing a function to execute.

NOTE: It's worth highlighting there are numerous ways to create event listeners. You can use
anonymous functions, or create named ones. You can use various shortcuts, like setting the
click property, or using addEventListener . In our exercise we are going to focus on
addEventLister and anonymous functions, as it's probably the most common technique
web developers use. It's also the most flexible, as addEventListener works for all events,
and the event name can be provided as a parameter.

Common events
There are dozens of events available for you to listen to when creating an application. Basically
anything a user does on a page raises an event, which gives you a lot of power to ensure they get the
experience you desire. Fortunately, you'll normally only need a small handful of events. Here's a few
common ones (including the two we'll use when creating our game):
click: The user clicked on something, typically a button or hyperlink
contextmenu: The user clicked the right mouse button
select: The user highlighted some text
input: The user input some text
Creating the game
We are going to create a game to explore how events work in JavaScript. Our game is going to test a
player's typing skill, which is one of the most underrated skills all developers should have. We should
all be practicing our typing! The general flow of the game will look like this:
Player clicks on start button and is presented with a quote to type
Player types the quote as quickly as they can in a textbox
As each word is completed, the next one is highlighted
If the player has a typo, the textbox is updated to red
When the player completes the quote, a success message is displayed with the elapsed time
Let's build our game, and learn about events!

File structure
We're going to need three total files: index.html, script.js and style.css. Let's start by setting those
up to make life a little easier for us.
Create a new folder for your work by opening a console or terminal window and issuing the
following command:
bash

# Linux or macOS
mkdir typing-game && cd typing-game

# Windows
md typing-game && cd typing-game

Open Visual Studio Code

bash
code .

Add three files to the folder in Visual Studio Code with the following names:
index.html
script.js
style.css

Create the user interface

If we explore the requirements, we know we're going to need a handful of elements on our HTML
page. This is sort of like a recipe, where we need some ingredients:
Somewhere to display the quote for the user to type
Somewhere to display any messages, like a success message
A textbox for typing
A start button
Each of those will need IDs so we can work with them in our JavaScript. We will also add references
to the CSS and JavaScript files we're going to create.
Create a new file named index.html. Add the following HTML:
html
<!-- inside index.html -->
<html>
<head>
<title>Typing game</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
</head>
<body>
<h1>Typing game!</h1>
<p>Practice your typing skills with a quote from Sherlock Holmes. Click *
<p id="quote"></p> <!-- This will display our quote -->
<p id="message"></p> <!-- This will display any status messages -->
<div>
<input type="text" aria-label="current word" id="typed-value" /> <!-- T
<button type="button" id="start">Start</button> <!-- To start the game
</div>
<script src="script.js"></script>
</body>
</html>

Launch the application

It's always best to develop iteratively to see how things look. Let's launch our application. There's a
wonderful extension for Visual Studio Code called Live Server which will both host your application
locally and refresh the browser each time you save.
Install Live Server by following the link and clicking Install
You will be prompted by the browser to open Visual Studio Code, and then by Visual Studio
Code to perform the installation
 Restart Visual Studio Code if prompted
Once installed, in Visual Studio Code, click Ctrl-Shift-P (or Cmd-Shift-P) to open the command
pallate
Type Live Server: Open with Live Server
Live Server will start hosting your application
Open a browser and navigate to https://localhost:5500
You should now see the page you created!
Let's add some functionality.

Add the CSS

With our HTML created, let's add the CSS for core styling. We need to highlight the word the player
should be typing, and colorize the textbox if what they've typed is incorrect. We'll do this with two
classes.
Create a new file named style.css and add the following syntax.
css

/* inside style.css */
.highlight {
background-color: yellow;
}

.error {
background-color: lightcoral;
border: red;
}

✅ When it comes to CSS you can layout your page however you might like. Take a little time and
make the page look more appealing:
Choose a different font
Colorize the headers
Resize items

JavaScript
With our UI created, it's time to focus our attention on the JavaScript which will provide the logic.
We're going to break this down into a handful of steps:
Create the constants
Event listener to start the game
Event listener to typing
But first, create a new file named script.js.

Add the constants

We're going to need a few items to make our lives a little easier for programming. Again, similar to a
recipe, here's what we'll need:
Array with the list of all quotes
Empty array to store all the words for the current quote
Space to store the index of the word the player is currently typing
The time the player clicked start
We're also going to want references to the UI elements:
The textbox (typed-value)
The quote display (quote)
The message (message)
javascript

// inside script.js
// all of our quotes
const quotes = [
'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however imp
'There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.',
'I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears to be opposed to
'I never make exceptions. An exception disproves the rule.',
'What one man can invent another can discover.',
'Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.',
'Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the grea
];
// store the list of words and the index of the word the player is currentl
let words = [];
let wordIndex = 0;
// the starting time
let startTime = Date.now();
// page elements
const quoteElement = document.getElementById('quote');
 const messageElement = document.getElementById('message');
const typedValueElement = document.getElementById('typed-value');

✅ Go ahead and add more quotes to your game

NOTE: We can retrieve the elements whenever we want in code by using

document.getElementById . Because of the fact we're going to refer to these elements
on a regular basis we're going to avoid typos with string literals by using constants.
Frameworks such as Vue.js or React can help you better manage centralizing your code.

Take a minute to watch a video on using const , let and var

🎥 Click the image above for a video about variables.

Add start logic

To begin the game, the player will click on start. Of course, we don't know when they're going to click
start. This is where an event listener comes into play. An event listener will allow us to listen for
something to occur (an event) and execute code in response. In our case, we want to execute code
when the user clicks on start.
When the user clicks start, we need to select a quote, setup the user interface, and setup tracking for
the current word and timing. Below is the JavaScript you'll need to add; we discuss it just after the
script block.
javascript

// at the end of script.js

document.getElementById('start').addEventListener('click', () => {
// get a quote
const quoteIndex = Math.floor(Math.random() * quotes.length);
const quote = quotes[quoteIndex];
// Put the quote into an array of words
words = quote.split(' ');
// reset the word index for tracking
wordIndex = 0;

// UI updates
// Create an array of span elements so we can set a class
const spanWords = words.map(function(word) { return `<span>${word} </span
// Convert into string and set as innerHTML on quote display
quoteElement.innerHTML = spanWords.join('');
// Highlight the first word
quoteElement.childNodes[0].className = 'highlight';
// Clear any prior messages
messageElement.innerText = '';

// Setup the textbox

// Clear the textbox
typedValueElement.value = '';
// set focus
typedValueElement.focus();
// set the event handler

// Start the timer

startTime = new Date().getTime();
});

Let's break down the code!

Setup the word tracking
Using Math.floor and Math.random allows us to randomly select a quote from the quotes
array
We convert the quote into an array of words so we can track the word the player is
currently typing
wordIndex is set to 0, since the player will start on the first word
 Setup the UI
Create an array of spanWords , which contains each word inside a span element
This will allow us to highlight the word on the display
join the array to create a string which we can use to update the innerHTML on
quoteElement
This will display the quote to the player
Set the className of the first span element to highlight to highlight it as yellow
Clean the messageElement by setting innerText to ''
Setup the textbox
Clear the current value on typedValueElement
Set the focus to typedValueElement
Start the timer by calling getTime

Add typing logic

As the player types, an input event will be raised. This event listener will check to ensure the
player is typing the word correctly, and handle the current status of the game. Returning to script.js,
add the following code to the end. We will break it down afterwards.
javascript

// at the end of script.js

typedValueElement.addEventListener('input', () => {
// Get the current word
const currentWord = words[wordIndex];
// get the current value
const typedValue = typedValueElement.value;

if (typedValue === currentWord && wordIndex === words.length - 1) {

// end of sentence
// Display success
const elapsedTime = new Date().getTime() - startTime;
const message = `CONGRATULATIONS! You finished in ${elapsedTime / 1000}
messageElement.innerText = message;
} else if (typedValue.endsWith(' ') && typedValue.trim() === currentWord)
// end of word
// clear the typedValueElement for the new word
typedValueElement.value = '';
// move to the next word
wordIndex++;
// reset the class name for all elements in quote
for (const wordElement of quoteElement.childNodes) {
wordElement.className = '';
 }
// highlight the new word
quoteElement.childNodes[wordIndex].className = 'highlight';
} else if (currentWord.startsWith(typedValue)) {
// currently correct
// highlight the next word
typedValueElement.className = '';
} else {
// error state
typedValueElement.className = 'error';
}
});

Let's break down the code! We start by grabbing the current word and the value the player has typed
thus far. Then we have waterfall logic, where we check if the quote is complete, the word is complete,
the word is correct, or (finally), if there is an error.
Quote is complete, indicated by typedValue being equal to currentWord , and
wordIndex being equal to one less than the length of words
Calculate elapsedTime by subtracting startTime from the current time
Divide elapsedTime by 1,000 to convert from milliseconds to seconds
Display a success message
Word is complete, indicated by typedValue ending with a space (the end of a word) and
typedValue being equal to currentWord
Set value on typedElement to be '' to allow for the next word to be typed
Increment wordIndex to move to the next word
Loop through all childNodes of quoteElement to set className to '' to revert
to default display
Set className of the current word to highlight to flag it as the next word to type
Word is currently typed correctly (but not complete), indicated by currentWord started with
typedValue
Ensure typedValueElement is displayed as default by clearing className
If we made it this far, we have an error
Set className on typedValueElement to error

Test your application

You've made it to the end! The last step is to ensure our application works. Give it a shot! Don't worry
if there are errors; all developers have errors. Examine the messages and debug as needed.
Click on start, and start typing away! It should look a little like the animation we saw before.

🚀 Challenge
Add more functionality
Disable the input event listener on completion, and re-enable it when the button is clicked
Disable the textbox when the player completes the quote
Display a modal dialog box with the success message
Store high scores using localStorage

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

Read up on all the events available to the developer via the web browser, and consider the scenarios
in which you would use each one.
Assignment
Create a new keyboard game

Browser Extension Project Part 1: All about

Browsers

Sketchnote by Wassim Chegham

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz
Introduction
Browser extensions add additional functionality to a browser. But before you build one, you should
learn a little about how browsers do their work.

About the browser

In this series of lessons, you'll learn how to build a browser extension that will work on Chrome,
Firefox and Edge browsers. In this part, you'll discover how browsers work and scaffold out the
elements of the browser extension.
But what is a browser exactly? It is a software application that allows an end user to access content
from a server and display it on web pages.
✅ A little history: the first browser was called 'WorldWideWeb' and was created by Sir Timothy
Berners-Lee in 1990.

Some early browsers, via Karen McGrane

When a user connected to the internet using a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) address, usually
using Hypertext Transfer Protocol via an http or https address, the browser communicates
with a web server and fetches a web page.
At this point, the browser's rendering engine displays it on the user's device, which might be a mobile
phone, desktop, or laptop.
Browsers also have the ability to cache content so that it doesn't have to be retrieved from the server
every time. They can record the history of a user's browsing activity, store 'cookies', which are small
bits of data that contain information used to store a user's activity, and more.
A really important thing to remember about browsers is that they are not all the same! Each browser
has its strengths and weaknesses, and a professional web developer needs to understand how to
make web pages perform well cross-browser. This includes handling small viewports such as a
mobile phone's, as well as a user who is offline.
A really useful website that you probably should bookmark in whatever browser you prefer to use is
caniuse.com. When you are building web pages, it's very helpful to use caniuse's lists of supported
technologies so that you can best support your users.
✅ How can you tell what browsers are most popular with your web site's user base? Check your
analytics - you can install various analytics packages as part of your web development process, and
they will tell you what browsers are most used by the various popular browsers.

Browser extensions
Why would you want to build a browser extension? It's a handy thing to attach to your browser when
you need quick access to tasks that you tend to repeat. For example, if you find yourself needing to
check colors on the various web pages that you interact with, you might install a color-picker browser
extension. If you have trouble remembering passwords, you might use a password-management
browser extension.
Browser extensions are fun to develop, too. They tend to manage a finite number of tasks that they
perform well.
✅ What are your favorite browser extensions? What tasks do they perform?

Installing extensions
Before you start building, take a look at the process of building and deploying a browser extension.
While each browser varies a bit in how they manage this task, the process is similar on Chrome and
Firefox to this example on Edge:
In essence, the process will be:
build your extension using npm run build
navigate in the browser to the extensions pane using the "Settings and more" button (the ...
icon) on the top right
if it's a new installation, choose load unpacked to upload a fresh extension from its build
folder (in our case it is /dist )
or, click reload if you are reloading the already-installed extension
✅ These instructions pertain to extensions you build yourself; to install extensions that have been
released to the browser extension store associated to each browser, you should navigate to those
stores and install the extension of your choice.

Get Started
You're going to build a browser extension that displays your region's carbon footprint, showing your
region's energy usage and the source of the energy. The extension will have a form that collects an
API key so that you can access CO2 Signal's API.
You need:
an API key; enter your email in the box on this page and one will be sent to you
the code for your region corresponding to the Electricity Map (in Boston, for example, I use 'US-
NEISO').
 the starter code. Download the start folder; you will be completing code in this folder.
NPM - NPM is a package management tool; install it locally and the packages listed in you
package.json file will be installed for use by your web asset

✅ Learn more about package management in this excellent Learn module

Take a minute to look through the codebase:
dist -|manifest.json (defaults set here) -|index.html (front-end HTML markup here) -|background.js
(background JS here) -|main.js (built JS) src -|index.js (your JS code goes here)
✅ Once you have your API key and Region code handy, store those somewhere in a note for future
use.

Build the HTML for the extension

This extension has two views. One to gather the API key and region code:
And the second to display the region's carbon usage:
Let's start by building the HTML for the form and styling it with CSS.
In the /dist folder, you will build a form and a result area. In the index.html file, populate the
delineated form area:
HTML

<form class="form-data" autocomplete="on">

<div>
<h2>New? Add your Information</h2>
</div>
<div>
<label for="region">Region Name</label>
<input type="text" id="region" required class="region-name" />
 </div>
<div>
<label for="api">Your API Key from tmrow</label>
<input type="text" id="api" required class="api-key" />
</div>
<button class="search-btn">Submit</button>
</form>

This is the form where your saved information will be input and saved to local storage.
Next, create the results area; under the final form tag, add some divs:
HTML

<div class="result">
<div class="loading">loading...</div>
<div class="errors"></div>
<div class="data"></div>
<div class="result-container">
<p><strong>Region: </strong><span class="my-region"></span></p>
<p><strong>Carbon Usage: </strong><span class="carbon-usage"></span
<p><strong>Fossil Fuel Percentage: </strong><span class="fossil-fue
</div>
<button class="clear-btn">Change region</button>
</div>

At this point, you can try a build. Make sure to install the package dependencies of this extension:

npm install

This command will use npm, the Node Package Manager, to install webpack for your extension's
build process. Webpack is a bundler that handles compiling code. You can see the output of this
process by looking in /dist/main.js - you see the code has been bundled.
For now, the extension should build and, if you deploy it into Edge as an extension, you'll see a form
neatly displayed.
Congratulations, you've taken the first steps towards building a browser extension. In subsequent
lessons, you'll make it more functional and useful.

🚀 Challenge
Take a look at a browser extension store and install one to your browser. You can examine its files in
interesting ways. What do you discover?

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

In this lesson you learned a little about the history of the web browser; take this opportunity to learn
about how the inventors of the World Wide Web envisioned its use by reading more about its history.
Some useful sites include:
The History of Web Browsers
History of the Web
An interview with Tim Berners-Lee

Assignment
Restyle your extension

Browser Extension Project Part 2: Call an

API, use Local Storage
Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz

Introduction
In this lesson, you'll call an API by submitting your browser extension's form and display the results in
your browser extension. In addition, you'll learn about how you can store data in your browser's local
storage for future reference and use.
✅ Follow the numbered segments in the appropriate files to know where to place your code

Set up the elements to manipulate in the extension:

By this time you have built the HTML for the form and results <div> for your browser extension.
From now on, you'll need to work in the /src/index.js file and building your extension bit by bit.
Refer to the previous lesson on getting your project set up and on the build process.
Working in your index.js file, start by creating some const variables to hold the values
associated with various fields:
JavaScript

// form fields
const form = document.querySelector('.form-data');
const region = document.querySelector('.region-name');
const apiKey = document.querySelector('.api-key');

// results
const errors = document.querySelector('.errors');
const loading = document.querySelector('.loading');
const results = document.querySelector('.result-container');
const usage = document.querySelector('.carbon-usage');
const fossilfuel = document.querySelector('.fossil-fuel');
const myregion = document.querySelector('.my-region');
const clearBtn = document.querySelector('.clear-btn');

All of these fields are referenced by their css class, as you set it up in the HTML in the previous
lesson.

Add listeners
Next, add event listeners to the form and the clear button that resets the form, so that if a user
submits the form or clicks that reset button, something will happen, and add the call to initialize the
app at the bottom of the file:
JavaScript

form.addEventListener('submit', (e) => handleSubmit(e));

clearBtn.addEventListener('click', (e) => reset(e));
init();
✅ Notice the shorthand used to listen for a submit or click event, and how the event it is passed to
the handleSubmit or reset functions. Can you write the equivalent of this shorthand in a longer
format? Which do you prefer?

Build out the init() function and the reset() function:

Now you are going to build the function that initializes the extension, which is called init():
JavaScript

function init() {
//if anything is in localStorage, pick it up
const storedApiKey = localStorage.getItem('apiKey');
const storedRegion = localStorage.getItem('regionName');

//set icon to be generic green

//todo

if (storedApiKey === null || storedRegion === null) {

//if we don't have the keys, show the form
form.style.display = 'block';
results.style.display = 'none';
loading.style.display = 'none';
clearBtn.style.display = 'none';
errors.textContent = '';
} else {
//if we have saved keys/regions in localStorage, show results when
displayCarbonUsage(storedApiKey, storedRegion);
results.style.display = 'none';
form.style.display = 'none';
clearBtn.style.display = 'block';
}
};

function reset(e) {
e.preventDefault();
//clear local storage for region only
localStorage.removeItem('regionName');
init();
}

In this function, there is some interesting logic. Reading through it, can you see what happens?
 two const are set up to check if the user has stored an APIKey and region code in local
storage.
if either of those is null, show the form by changing its style to display as 'block'
hide the results, loading, and clearBtn and set any error text to an empty string
if there exists a key and region, start a routine to:
call the API to get carbon usage data
hide the results area
hide the form
show the reset button
Before moving on, it's useful to learn about a very important concept available in browsers:
LocalStorage. LocalStorage is a useful way to store strings in the browser as a key-value pair.
This type of web storage can be manipulated by JavaScript to manage data in the browser.
LocalStorage does not expire, while SessionStorage, another kind of web storage, is cleared when
the browser is closed. The various types of storage have pros and cons to their usage.

Note - your browser extension has its own local storage; the main browser window is a
different instance and behaves separately.

You set your APIKey to have a string value, for example, and you can see that it is set on Edge by
"inspecting" a web page (you can right-click a browser to inspect) and going to the Applications tab
to see the storage.
✅ Think about situations where you would NOT want to store some data in LocalStorage. In general,
placing API Keys in LocalStorage is a bad idea! Can you see why? In our case, since our app is purely
for learning and will not be deployed to an app store, we will use this method.
Notice that you use the Web API to manipulate LocalStorage, either by using getItem() ,
setItem() or removeItem() . It's widely supported across browsers.

Before building the displayCarbonUsage() function that is called in init() , let's build the
functionality to handle the initial form submission.

Handle the form submission

Create a function called handleSubmit that accepts an event argument (e) . Stop the event
from propagating (in this case, we want to stop the browser from refreshing) and call a new function,
setUpUser , passing in the arguments apiKey.value and region.value . In this way, you
use the two values that are brought in via the initial form when the appropriate fields are populated.
JavaScript

function handleSubmit(e) {
e.preventDefault();
setUpUser(apiKey.value, region.value);
}

✅ Refresh your memory - the HTML you set up in the last lesson has two input fields whose
values are captured via the const you set up at the top of the file, and they are both
required so the browser stops users from inputting null values.

Set up the user

Moving on to the setUpUser function, here is where you set local storage values for apiKey and
regionName. Add a new function:
JavaScript

function setUpUser(apiKey, regionName) {

localStorage.setItem('apiKey', apiKey);
localStorage.setItem('regionName', regionName);
loading.style.display = 'block';
errors.textContent = '';
clearBtn.style.display = 'block';
//make initial call
displayCarbonUsage(apiKey, regionName);
}
This function sets a loading message to show while the API is called. At this point, you have arrived at
creating the most important function of this browser extension!

Display Carbon Usage

Finally it's time to query the API!
Before going further, we should discuss APIs. APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are a
critical element of a web developer's toolbox. They provide standard ways for programs to interact
and interface with each other. For example, if you are building a web site that needs to query a
database, someone might have created an API for you to use. While there are many types of APIs,
one of the most popular is a REST API.
✅ The term 'REST' stands for 'Representational State Transfer' and features using variously-
configured URLs to fetch data. Do a little research on the various types of APIs available to
developers. What format appeals to you?
There are important things to note about this function. First notice the async keyword. Writing
your functions so that they run asynchronously means that they wait for an action, such as data being
returned, to be completed before continuing.
Here's a quick video about async :

🎥 Click the image above for a video about async/await.

Create a new function to query the C02Signal API:

 JavaScript

import axios from '../node_modules/axios';

async function displayCarbonUsage(apiKey, region) {

try {
await axios
.get('https://api.co2signal.com/v1/latest', {
params: {
countryCode: region,
},
headers: {
'auth-token': apiKey,
},
})
.then((response) => {
let CO2 = Math.floor(response.data.data.carbonIntensity);

//calculateColor(CO2);

loading.style.display = 'none';
form.style.display = 'none';
myregion.textContent = region;
usage.textContent =
Math.round(response.data.data.carbonIntensity) + ' gram
fossilfuel.textContent =
response.data.data.fossilFuelPercentage.toFixed(2) +
'% (percentage of fossil fuels used to generate electri
results.style.display = 'block';
});
} catch (error) {
console.log(error);
loading.style.display = 'none';
results.style.display = 'none';
errors.textContent = 'Sorry, we have no data for the region you hav
}
}

This is a big function. What's going on here?

following best practices, you use an async keyword to make this function behave
asyncronously. The function contains a try/catch block as it will return a promise when the
API returns data. Because you don't have control over the speed that the API will respond (it may
not respond at all!), you need to handle this uncertainty by call it asyncronously.
 you're querying the co2signal API to get your region's data, using your API Key. To use that key,
you have to use a type of authentication in your header parameters.
once the API responds, you assign various elements of its response data to the parts of your
screen you set up to show this data.
if there's an error, or if there is no result, you show an error message.
✅ Using asyncronous programming patterns is another very useful tool in your toolbox. Read about
the various ways you can configure this type of code.
Congratulations! If you build your extension ( npm run build ) and refresh it in your extensions
pane, you have a working extension! The only thing that isn't working is the icon, and you'll fix that in
the next lesson.

🚀 Challenge
We've discussed several types of API so far in these lessons. Choose a web API and research in
depth what it offers. For example, take a look at APIs available within browsers such as the HTML
Drag and Drop API. What makes a great API in your opinion?

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

You learned about LocalStorage and APIs in this lesson, both very useful for the professional web
developer. Can you think how these two things work together? Think about how you would architect a
web site that would store items to be used by an API.

Assignment
Adopt an API
Browser Extension Project Part 3: Learn
about Background Tasks and Performance
Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz

Introduction
In the last two lessons of this module, you learned how to build a form and display area for data
fetched from an API. It's a very standard way of creating web presences on the web. You even
learned how to handle fetching data asyncronously. Your browser extension is very nearly complete.
It remains to manage some background tasks, including refreshing the color of the extension's icon,
so this is a great time to talk about how the browser manages this kind of task. Let's think about
these browser tasks in the context of the performance of your web assets as you build them.

Web Performance Basics

"Website performance is about two things: how fast the page loads, and how fast the code on
it runs." -- Zack Grossbart

The topic of how to make your web sites blazingly fast on all kinds of devices, for all kinds of users, in
all kinds of situations, is unsurprisingly vast. Here are some points to keep in mind as you build either
a standard web project or a browser extension.
The first thing you need to do to ensure that your site is running efficiently is to gather data about its
performance. The first place to do this is in the developer tools of your web browser. In Edge, you can
select the "Settings and more" button (the three dots icon on the top right of the browser), then
navigate to More Tools > Developer Tools and open the Performance tab. You can also use the
keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + Shift + I on Windows, or Option + Command + I on Mac
to open developer tools.
The Performance tab contains a Profiling tool. Open a web site (try, for example,
https://www.microsoft.com) and click the 'Record' button, then refresh the site. Stop the recording at
any time, and you will be able to see the routines that are generated to 'script', 'render', and 'paint'
the site:

✅ Visit the Microsoft Documentation on the Performance panel in Edge

Tip: to get a true reading of your web site's startup time, clear your browser's cache

Select elements of the profile timeline to zoom in on events that happen while your page loads.
Get a snapshot of your page's performance by selecting a part of the profile timeline and looking at
the summary pane:
Check the Event Log pane to see if any event took longer than 15 ms:

✅ Get to know your profiler! Open the developer tools on this site and see if there are any
bottlenecks. What's the slowest-loading asset? The fastest?

Profiling checks
In general there are some "problem areas" that every web developer should watch for when building
a site, so as to avoid nasty surprises when it's time to deploy to production.
Asset sizes: The web has gotten 'heavier', and thus slower, over the past few years. Some of this
weight has to do with the use of images.
✅ Look through the Internet Archive for a historical view of page weight and more.
A good practice is to ensure that your images are optimized, delivered at the right size and resolution
for your users.
DOM traversals: The browser has to build its Document Object Model based on the code you write,
so it's in the interest of good page performance to keep your tags minimal, only using and styling
what the page needs. To this point, excess CSS associated with a page could be optimized; styles
that need to be used only on one page don't need to be included in the main style sheet, for example.
JavaScript: Every JavaScript developer should watch for 'render-blocking' scripts that must be
loaded before the rest of the DOM can be traversed and painted to the browser. Consider using
defer with your inline scripts (as is done in the Terrarium module).

✅ Try some sites on a Site Speed Test website to learn more about the common checks that are
done to determine site performance.
Now that you have an idea on how the browser renders the assets you send to it, let's look at the last
few things you need to do to complete your extension:

Create a function to calculate color

Working in /src/index.js , add a function called calculateColor() after the series of
const variables you set to gain access to the DOM:

JavaScript

function calculateColor(value) {
let co2Scale = [0, 150, 600, 750, 800];
let colors = ['#2AA364', '#F5EB4D', '#9E4229', '#381D02', '#381D02'];

let closestNum = co2Scale.sort((a, b) => {

return Math.abs(a - value) - Math.abs(b - value);
})[0];
console.log(value + ' is closest to ' + closestNum);
let num = (element) => element > closestNum;
let scaleIndex = co2Scale.findIndex(num);

let closestColor = colors[scaleIndex];

console.log(scaleIndex, closestColor);

chrome.runtime.sendMessage({ action: 'updateIcon', value: { color: clos

}

What's going on here? You pass in a value (the carbon intensity) from the API call you completed in
the last lesson, and then you calculate how close its value is to the index presented in colors array.
Then you send that closest color value over to the chrome runtime.
The chrome.runtime has an API that handles all kinds of background tasks, and your extension is
leveraging that:
 "Use the chrome.runtime API to retrieve the background page, return details about the
manifest, and listen for and respond to events in the app or extension lifecycle. You can also
use this API to convert the relative path of URLs to fully-qualified URLs."

✅ If you're developing this browser extension for Edge, it might surprise you that you're using a
chrome API. The newer Edge browser versions run on the Chromium browser engine, so you can
leverage these tools.

Note, if you want to profile a browser extension, launch the dev tools from within the
extension itself, as it is its own separate browser instance.

Set a default icon color

Now, in the init() function, set the icon to be generic green to start by again calling chrome's
updateIcon action:
JavaScript

chrome.runtime.sendMessage({
action: 'updateIcon',
value: {
color: 'green',
},
});

Call the function, execute the call

Next, call that function you just created by adding it to the promise returned by the C02Signal API:
JavaScript
//let CO2...
calculateColor(CO2);

And finally, in /dist/background.js , add the listener for these background action calls:
JavaScript

chrome.runtime.onMessage.addListener(function (msg, sender, sendResponse) {

if (msg.action === 'updateIcon') {
chrome.browserAction.setIcon({ imageData: drawIcon(msg.value) });
 }
});
//borrowed from energy lollipop extension, nice feature!
function drawIcon(value) {
let canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
let context = canvas.getContext('2d');

context.beginPath();
context.fillStyle = value.color;
context.arc(100, 100, 50, 0, 2 * Math.PI);
context.fill();

return context.getImageData(50, 50, 100, 100);

}

In this code, you are adding a listener for any messages coming to the backend task manager. If it's
called 'updateIcon', then the next code is run, to draw an icon of the proper color using the Canvas
API.
✅ You'll learn more about the Canvas API in the Space Game lessons.
Now, rebuild your extension ( npm run build ), refresh and launch your extension, and watch the
color change. Is it a good time to run an errand or wash the dishes? Now you know!
Congratulations, you've built a useful browser extension and learned more about how the browser
works and how to profile its performance.

🚀 Challenge
Investigate some open source web sites have been around a long time ago, and, based on their
GitHub history, see if you can determine how they were optimized over the years for performance, if
at all. What is the most common pain point?

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz
Review & Self Study
Consider signing up for a performance newsletter
Investigate some of the ways that browsers gauge web performance by looking through the
performance tabs in their web tools. Do you find any major differences?

Assignment
Analyze a site for performance

Build a Space Game Part 1: Introduction

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz

Inheritance and Composition in game development

In earlier lessons, there was not much need to worry about the design architecture of the apps you
built, as the projects were very small in scope. However, when your applications grow in size and
scope, architectural decisions become a larger concern. There are two major approaches to creating
larger applications in JavaScript: composition or inheritance. There are pros and cons to both but
let's explain them from within the context of a game.
✅ One of the most famous programming books ever written has to do with design patterns.
In a game you have game objects which are objects that exist on a screen. This means they have
a location on a cartesian coordinate system, characterized by having an x and y coordinate. As
you develop a game you will notice that all your game objects have a standard property, common for
every game you create, namely elements that are:
location-based Most, if not all, game elements are location based. This means that they have a
location, an x and y .
movable These are objects that can move to a new location. This is typically a hero, a monster or
an NPC (a non player character), but not for example, a static object like a tree.
self-destructing These objects only exist for a set period of time before they set themselves up
for deletion. Usually this is represented by a dead or destroyed boolean that signals to the
game engine that this object should no longer be rendered.
cool-down 'Cool-down' is a typical property among short-lived objects. A typical example is a
piece of text or graphical effect like an explosion that should only be seen for a few milliseconds.
✅ Think about a game like Pac-Man. Can you identify the four object types listed above in this
game?

Expressing behavior
All we described above are behavior that game objects can have. So how do we encode those? We
can express this behavior as methods associated to either classes or objects.
Classes
The idea is to use classes in conjunction with inheritance to accomplish adding a certain
behavior to a class.
✅ Inheritance is an important concept to understand. Learn more on MDN's article about
inheritance.
Expressed via code, a game object can typically look like this:
javascript

//set up the class GameObject

class GameObject {
 constructor(x, y, type) {
this.x = x;
this.y = y;
this.type = type;
}
}

//this class will extend the GameObject's inherent class properties

class Movable extends GameObject {
constructor(x,y, type) {
super(x,y, type)
}

//this movable object can be moved on the screen

moveTo(x, y) {
this.x = x;
this.y = y;
}
}

//this is a specific class that extends the Movable class, so it can take a
class Hero extends Movable {
constructor(x,y) {
super(x,y, 'Hero')
}
}

//this class, on the other hand, only inherits the GameObject properties
class Tree extends GameObject {
constructor(x,y) {
super(x,y, 'Tree')
}
}

//a hero can move...

const hero = new Hero();
hero.moveTo(5,5);

//but a tree cannot

const tree = new Tree();

✅ Take a few minutes to re-envision a Pac-Man hero (Inky, Pinky or Blinky, for example) and how it
would be written in JavaScript.
Composition
A different way of handling object inheritance is by using Composition. Then, objects express their
behavior like this:
javascript

//create a constant gameObject

const gameObject = {
x: 0,
y: 0,
type: ''
};

//...and a constant movable

const movable = {
moveTo(x, y) {
this.x = x;
this.y = y;
}
}
//then the constant movableObject is composed of the gameObject and movable
const movableObject = {...gameObject, ...movable};

//then create a function to create a new Hero who inherits the movableObjec
function createHero(x, y) {
return {
...movableObject,
x,
y,
type: 'Hero'
}
}
//...and a static object that inherits only the gameObject properties
function createStatic(x, y, type) {
return {
...gameObject
x,
y,
type
}
}
//create the hero and move it
const hero = createHero(10,10);
hero.moveTo(5,5);
 //and create a static tree which only stands around
const tree = createStatic(0,0, 'Tree');

Which pattern should I use?

It's up to you which pattern you choose. JavaScript supports both these paradigms.
--
Another pattern common in game development addresses the problem of handling the game's user
experience and performance.

Pub/sub pattern
✅ Pub/Sub stands for 'publish-subscribe'
This pattern addresses the idea that the disparate parts of your application shouldn't know about one
another. Why is that? It makes it a lot easier to see what's going on in general if various parts are
separated. It also makes it easier to suddenly change behavior if you need to. How do we accomplish
this? We do this by establishing some concepts:
message: A message is usually a text string accompanied by an optional payload (a piece of data
that clarifies what the message is about). A typical message in a game can be
KEY_PRESSED_ENTER .
publisher: This element publishes a message and sends it out to all subscribers.
subscriber: This element listens to specific messages and carries out some task as the result of
receiving this message, such as firing a laser.
The implementation is quite small in size but it's a very powerful pattern. Here's how it can be
implemented:
javascript
//set up an EventEmitter class that contains listeners
class EventEmitter {
constructor() {
this.listeners = {};
}
//when a message is received, let the listener to handle its payload
on(message, listener) {
if (!this.listeners[message]) {
this.listeners[message] = [];
}
this.listeners[message].push(listener);
 }
//when a message is sent, send it to a listener with some payload
emit(message, payload = null) {
if (this.listeners[message]) {
this.listeners[message].forEach(l => l(message, payload))
}
}
}

To use the above code we can create a very small implementation:

javascript

//set up a message structure

const Messages = {
HERO_MOVE_LEFT: 'HERO_MOVE_LEFT'
};
//invoke the eventEmitter you set up above
const eventEmitter = new EventEmitter();
//set up a hero
const hero = createHero(0,0);
//let the eventEmitter know to watch for messages pertaining to the hero mo
eventEmitter.on(Messages.HERO_MOVE_LEFT, () => {
hero.move(5,0);
});

//set up the window to listen for the keyup event, specifically if the left
window.addEventListener('keyup', (evt) => {
if (evt.key === 'ArrowLeft') {
eventEmitter.emit(Messages.HERO_MOVE_LEFT)
}
});

Above we connect a keyboard event, ArrowLeft and send the HERO_MOVE_LEFT message. We
listen to that message and move the hero as a result. The strength with this pattern is that the
event listener and the hero don't know about each other. You can remap the ArrowLeft to the A
key. Additionally it would be possible to do something completely different on ArrowLeft by
making a few edits to the eventEmitter's on function:
javascript

eventEmitter.on(Messages.HERO_MOVE_LEFT, () => {
hero.move(5,0);
});
As things gets more complicated when your game grows, this pattern stays the same in complexity
and your code stays clean. It's really recommended to adopt this pattern.

🚀 Challenge
Think about how the pub-sub pattern can enhance a game. Which parts should emit events, and how
should the game react to them? Now's your chance to get creative, thinking of a new game and how
its parts might behave.

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

Learn more about Pub/Sub by reading about it.

Assignment
Mock up a game

Build a Space Game Part 2: Draw Hero and

Monsters to Canvas
Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz
The Canvas
The canvas is an HTML element that by default has no content; it's a blank slate. You need to add to it
by drawing on it.
✅ Read more about the Canvas API on MDN.
Here's how it's typically declared, as part of the page's body:
html

<canvas id="myCanvas" width="200" height="100"></canvas>

Above we are setting the id , width and height .

id : set this so you can obtain a reference when you need to interact with it.
width : this is the width of the element.
height : this is the height of the element.

Drawing simple geometry

The Canvas is using a cartesian coordinate system to draw things. Thus it uses an x-axis and y-axis
to express where something is located. The location 0,0 is the top left position and the bottom
right is what you said to be the WIDTH and HEIGHT of the canvas.

Image from MDN

To draw on the canvas element you will need to go through the following steps:
 1. Get a reference to the Canvas element.
2. Get a reference on the Context element that sits on the canvas element.
3. Perform a drawing operation using the context element.
Code for the above steps usually looks like so:
javascript

// draws a red rectangle

//1. get the canvas reference
canvas = document.getElementById("myCanvas");

//2. set the context to 2D to draw basic shapes

ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");

//3. fill it with the color red

ctx.fillStyle = 'red';

//4. and draw a rectangle with these parameters, setting location and size
ctx.fillRect(0,0, 200, 200) // x,y,width, height

✅ The Canvas API mostly focuses on 2D shapes, but you can also draw 3D elements to a web site;
for this, you might use the WebGL API.
You can draw all sorts of things with the Canvas API like:
Geometrical shapes, we've already showed how to draw a rectangle, but there is much more you
can draw.
Text, you can draw a text with any font and color you wish.
Images, you can draw an image based off of an image asset like a .jpg or .png for example.
✅ Try it! You know how to draw a rectangle, can you draw a circle to a page? Take a look at some
interesting Canvas drawings on CodePen. Here's a particularly impressive example.

Load and draw an image asset

You load an image asset by creating an Image object and set its src property. Then you listen to
the load event to know when it's ready to be used. The code looks like this:

Load asset
 javascript

const img = new Image();

img.src = 'path/to/my/image.png';
img.onload = () => {
// image loaded and ready to be used
}

Load asset pattern

It's recommended to wrap the above in a construct like so, so it's easier to use and you only try to
manipulate it when it's fully loaded:
javascript

function loadAsset(path) {
return new Promise((resolve) => {
const img = new Image();
img.src = path;
img.onload = () => {
// image loaded and ready to be used
resolve(img);
}
})
}

// use like so

async function run() {

const heroImg = await loadAsset('hero.png')
const monsterImg = await loadAsset('monster.png')
}

To draw game assets to a screen, your code would look like this:
javascript

async function run() {

const heroImg = await loadAsset('hero.png')
const monsterImg = await loadAsset('monster.png')

canvas = document.getElementById("myCanvas");
ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
ctx.drawImage(heroImg, canvas.width/2,canvas.height/2);
ctx.drawImage(monsterImg, 0,0);
}
Now it's time to start building your game
What to build
You will build a web page with a Canvas element. It should render a black screen 1024*768 . We've
provided you with two images:
Hero ship

5*5 monster

Recommended steps to start development

Locate the files that have been created for you in the your-work sub folder. It should contain the
following:
bash

-| assets
-| enemyShip.png
-| player.png
-| index.html
-| app.js
-| package.json

Open the copy of this folder in Visual Studio Code. You need to have a local development
environment setup, preferably with Visual Studio Code with NPM and Node installed. If you don't
have npm set up on your computer, here's how to do that.
Start your project by navigating to the your_work folder:
bash

cd your-work
npm start
The above will start a HTTP Server on address http://localhost:5000 . Open up a browser
and input that address. It's a blank page right now, but that will change

Note: to see changes on your screen, refresh your browser.

Add code
Add the needed code to your-work/app.js to solve the below
1. Draw a canvas with black background

tip: add two lines under the appropriate TODO in /app.js , setting the ctx element
to be black and the top/left coordinates to be at 0,0 and the height and width to equal that
of the canvas.

2. Load textures

tip: add the player and enemy images using await loadTexture and passing in the
image path. You won't see them on the screen yet!

3. Draw hero in the center of the screen in the bottom half

tip: use the API to draw heroImg to the screen, setting

drawImage
canvas.width / 2 - 45 and canvas.height - canvas.height / 4) ;

4. Draw 5*5 monsters

tip: Now you can uncomment the code to draw enemies on the screen. Next, go to the
createEnemies function and build it out.
 First, set up some constants:
javascript

const MONSTER_TOTAL = 5;
const MONSTER_WIDTH = MONSTER_TOTAL * 98;
const START_X = (canvas.width - MONSTER_WIDTH) / 2;
const STOP_X = START_X + MONSTER_WIDTH;

then, create a loop to draw the array of monsters onto the screen:
javascript

for (let x = START_X; x < STOP_X; x += 98) {

for (let y = 0; y < 50 * 5; y += 50) {
ctx.drawImage(enemyImg, x, y);
}
}

Result
The finished result should look like so:
Solution
Please try solving it yourself first but if you get stuck, have a look at a solution

🚀 Challenge
You've learned about drawing with the 2D-focused Canvas API; take a look at the WebGL API, and try
to draw a 3D object.

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz
Review & Self Study
Learn more about the Canvas API by reading about it.

Assignment
Play with the Canvas API

Build a Space Game Part 3: Adding Motion

Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz
Games aren't much fun until you have aliens running around on screen! In this game, we will make
use of two types of movements:
Keyboard/Mouse movement: when the user interacts with the keyboard or mouse to move an
object on the screen.
Game induced movement: when the game moves an object with a certain time interval.
So how do we move things on a screen? It's all about cartesian coordinates: we change the location
(x,y) of the object and then redraw the screen.
Typically you need the following steps to accomplish movement on a screen:
1. Set a new location for an object; this is needed to perceive the object as having moved.
2. Clear the screen, the screen needs to be cleared in between draws. We can clear it by drawing a
rectangle that we fill with a background color.
3. Redraw object at new location. By doing this we finally accomplish moving the object from one
location to the other.
Here's what it can look like in code:
javascript

//set the hero's location

hero.x += 5;
 // clear the rectangle that hosts the hero
ctx.clearRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
// redraw the game background and hero
ctx.fillRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height)
ctx.fillStyle = "black";
ctx.drawImage(heroImg, hero.x, hero.y);

✅ Can you think of a reason why redrawing your hero many frames per second might accrue
performance costs? Read about alternatives to this pattern.

Handle keyboard events

You handle events by attaching specific events to code. Keyboard events are triggered on the whole
window whereas mouse events like a click can be connected to clicking a specific element. We
will use keyboard events throughout this project.
To handle an event you need to use the window's addEventListener() method and provide it
with two input parameters. The first parameter is the name of the event, for example keyup . The
second parameter is the function that should be invoked as a result of the event taking place.
Here's an example:
javascript
window.addEventListener('keyup', (evt) => {
// `evt.key` = string representation of the key
if (evt.key === 'ArrowUp') {
// do something
}
})

For key events there are two properties on the event you can use to see what key was pressed:
key , this is a string representation of the pressed key, for example ArrowUp
keyCode , this is a number representation, for example 37 , corresponds to ArrowLeft .

✅ Key event manipulation is useful outside of game development. What other uses can you think of
for this technique?

Special keys: a caveat

There are some special keys that affect the window. That means that if you are listening to a keyup
event and you use these special keys to move your hero it will also perform horizontal scrolling. For
that reason you might want to shut-off this built-in browser behavior as you build out your game. You
need code like this:
javascript

let onKeyDown = function (e) {

console.log(e.keyCode);
switch (e.keyCode) {
case 37:
case 39:
case 38:
case 40: // Arrow keys
case 32:
e.preventDefault();
break; // Space
default:
break; // do not block other keys
}
};

window.addEventListener('keydown', onKeyDown);

The above code will ensure that arrow-keys and the space key have their default behavior shut off.
The shut-off mechanism happens when we call e.preventDefault() .

Game induced movement

We can make things move by themselves by using timers such as the setTimeout() or
setInterval() function that update the location of the object on each tick, or time interval.
Here's what that can look like:
javascript

let id = setInterval(() => {

//move the enemy on the y axis
enemy.y += 10;
})

The game loop

The game loop is a concept that is essentially a function that is invoked at regular intervals. It's called
the game loop as everything that should be visible to the user is drawn into the loop. The game loop
makes use of all the game objects that are part of the game, drawing all of them unless for some
reason shouldn't be part of the game any more. For example if an object is an enemy that was hit by a
laser and blows up, it's no longer part of the current game loop (you'll learn more on this in
subsequent lessons).
Here's what a game loop can typically look like, expressed in code:
javascript

let gameLoopId = setInterval(() =>

function gameLoop() {
ctx.clearRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
ctx.fillStyle = "black";
ctx.fillRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
drawHero();
drawEnemies();
drawStaticObjects();
}, 200);

The above loop is invoked every 200 milliseconds to redraw the canvas. You have the ability to
choose the best interval that makes sense for your game.

Continuing the Space Game

You will take the existing code and extend it. Either start with the code that you completed during part
I or use the code in Part II- starter.
Moving the hero: you will add code to ensure you can move the hero using the arrow keys.
Move enemies: you will also need to add code to ensure the enemies move from top to bottom at
a given rate.

Recommended steps
Locate the files that have been created for you in the your-work sub folder. It should contain the
following:
 bash

-| assets
-| enemyShip.png
-| player.png
-| index.html
-| app.js
-| package.json

You start your project the your_work folder by typing:

bash

cd your-work
npm start

The above will start a HTTP Server on address http://localhost:5000 . Open up a browser
and input that address, right now it should render the hero and all the enemies; nothing is moving -
yet!

Add code
1. Add dedicated objects for hero and enemy and game object , they should have x and
y properties. (Remember the portion on Inheritance or composition ).

HINT game object should be the one with x and y and the ability to draw itself to a
canvas.

tip: start by adding a new GameObject class with its constructor delineated as below, and
then draw it to the canvas:

javascript

class GameObject {
constructor(x, y) {
this.x = x;
this.y = y;
this.dead = false;
this.type = "";
this.width = 0;
this.height = 0;
this.img = undefined;
 }

draw(ctx) {
ctx.drawImage(this.img, this.x, this.y, this.width, this.height);
}
}

Now, extend this GameObject to create the Hero and Enemy.

javascript
class Hero extends GameObject {
constructor(x, y) {
...it needs an x, y, type, and speed
}
}

javascript

class Enemy extends GameObject {

constructor(x, y) {
super(x, y);
(this.width = 98), (this.height = 50);
this.type = "Enemy";
let id = setInterval(() => {
if (this.y < canvas.height - this.height) {
this.y += 5;
} else {
console.log('Stopped at', this.y)
clearInterval(id);
}
}, 300)
}
}

2. Add key-event handlers to handle key navigation (move hero up/down left/right)
REMEMBER it's a cartesian system, top-left is 0,0 . Also remember to add code to stop default
behavior

tip: create your onKeyDown function and attach it to the window:

 javascript

let onKeyDown = function (e) {

console.log(e.keyCode);
...add the code from the lesson above to stop default behavior
}
};

window.addEventListener("keydown", onKeyDown);

Check your browser console at this point, and watch the keystrokes being logged.
3. Implement the Pub sub pattern, this will keep your code clean as you follow the remaining parts.
To do this last part, you can:
1. Add an event listener on the window:
javascript

window.addEventListener("keyup", (evt) => {

if (evt.key === "ArrowUp") {
eventEmitter.emit(Messages.KEY_EVENT_UP);
} else if (evt.key === "ArrowDown") {
eventEmitter.emit(Messages.KEY_EVENT_DOWN);
} else if (evt.key === "ArrowLeft") {
eventEmitter.emit(Messages.KEY_EVENT_LEFT);
} else if (evt.key === "ArrowRight") {
eventEmitter.emit(Messages.KEY_EVENT_RIGHT);
}
});

2. Create an EventEmitter class to publish and subscribe to messages:

javascript

class EventEmitter {
constructor() {
this.listeners = {};
}

on(message, listener) {
if (!this.listeners[message]) {
this.listeners[message] = [];
}
this.listeners[message].push(listener);
}
 emit(message, payload = null) {
if (this.listeners[message]) {
this.listeners[message].forEach((l) => l(message, payload));
}
}
}

3. Add constants and set up the EventEmitter:

javascript
const Messages = {
KEY_EVENT_UP: "KEY_EVENT_UP",
KEY_EVENT_DOWN: "KEY_EVENT_DOWN",
KEY_EVENT_LEFT: "KEY_EVENT_LEFT",
KEY_EVENT_RIGHT: "KEY_EVENT_RIGHT",
};

let heroImg,
enemyImg,
laserImg,
canvas, ctx,
gameObjects = [],
hero,
eventEmitter = new EventEmitter();

4. Initialize the game

javascript

function initGame() {
gameObjects = [];
createEnemies();
createHero();

eventEmitter.on(Messages.KEY_EVENT_UP, () => {
hero.y -=5 ;
})

eventEmitter.on(Messages.KEY_EVENT_DOWN, () => {
hero.y += 5;
});

eventEmitter.on(Messages.KEY_EVENT_LEFT, () => {
hero.x -= 5;
 });

eventEmitter.on(Messages.KEY_EVENT_RIGHT, () => {
hero.x += 5;
});
}

4. Setup the game loop

Refactor the window.onload function to initialize the game and set up a game loop on a good
interval. You'll also add a laser beam:
javascript
window.onload = async () => {
canvas = document.getElementById("canvas");
ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
heroImg = await loadTexture("assets/player.png");
enemyImg = await loadTexture("assets/enemyShip.png");
laserImg = await loadTexture("assets/laserRed.png");

initGame();
let gameLoopId = setInterval(() => {
ctx.clearRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
ctx.fillStyle = "black";
ctx.fillRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
drawGameObjects(ctx);
}, 100)

};

5. Add code to move enemies at a certain interval

Refactor the createEnemies() function to create the enemies and push them into the new
gameObjects class:
javascript

function createEnemies() {
const MONSTER_TOTAL = 5;
const MONSTER_WIDTH = MONSTER_TOTAL * 98;
const START_X = (canvas.width - MONSTER_WIDTH) / 2;
const STOP_X = START_X + MONSTER_WIDTH;

for (let x = START_X; x < STOP_X; x += 98) {

for (let y = 0; y < 50 * 5; y += 50) {
 const enemy = new Enemy(x, y);
enemy.img = enemyImg;
gameObjects.push(enemy);
}
}
}

and add a createHero() function to do a similar process for the hero.

javascript

function createHero() {
hero = new Hero(
canvas.width / 2 - 45,
canvas.height - canvas.height / 4
);
hero.img = heroImg;
gameObjects.push(hero);
}

and finally, add a drawGameObjects() function to start the drawing:

javascript

function drawGameObjects(ctx) {
gameObjects.forEach(go => go.draw(ctx));
}

Your enemies should start advancing on your hero spaceship!

🚀 Challenge
As you can see, your code can turn into 'spaghetti code' when you start adding functions and
variables and classes. How can you better organize your code so that it is more readable? Sketch out
a system to organize your code, even if it still resides in one file.

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz
Review & Self Study
While we're writing our game without using frameworks, there are many JavaScript-based canvas
frameworks for game development. Take some time to do some reading about these.

Assignment
Comment your code

Build a Space Game Part 4: Adding A

Laser and Detect Collisions
Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz
In this lesson you will learn how to shoot lasers with JavaScript! We will add two things to our game:
A laser: this laser is shot from your heroes ship and vertically upwards
Collision detection, as part of implementing the ability to shoot we will also add some nice game
rules:
Laser hits enemy: Enemy dies if hit by a laser
Laser hits top screen: A laser is destroyed if hitting the top part of the screen
Enemy and hero collision: An enemy and the hero are destroyed if hitting each other
Enemy hits bottom of the screen: An enemy and a hero are destroyed if the enemy hits the
bottom of the screen
In short, you -- the hero -- need to hit all enemies with a laser before they manage to move to the
bottom of the screen.
✅ Do a little research on the very first computer game ever written. What was its functionality?
Let's be heroic together!

Collision detection
How do we do collision detection? We need to think of our game objects as rectangles moving about.
Why is that you might ask? Well, the image used to draw a game object is a rectangle: it has an x ,
y , width and height .

If two rectangles, i.e a hero and enemy intersect, you have a collision. What should happen then is up
to the rules of the game. To implement collision detection you therefore need the following:
1. A way to get a rectangle representation of a game object, something like this:
javascript

rectFromGameObject() {
return {
top: this.y,
left: this.x,
bottom: this.y + this.height,
right: this.x + this.width
}
}

2. A comparison function, this function can look like this:

javascript

function intersectRect(r1, r2) {

return !(r2.left > r1.right ||
r2.right < r1.left ||
r2.top > r1.bottom ||
r2.bottom < r1.top);
}

How do we destroy things

To destroy things in a game you need to let the game know it should no longer paint this item in the
game loop that triggers on a certain interval. A way to do this is to mark a game object as dead when
something happens, like so:
javascript

// collision happened
enemy.dead = true
Then you an proceed to sort out dead objects before repainting the screen, like so:
javascript

gameObjects = gameObject.filter(go => !go.dead);

How do we fire a laser

Firing a laser translates to responding to a key-event and creating an object that moves in a certain
direction. We therefore need to carry out the following steps:
1. Create a laser object: from the top of our hero's ship, that upon creation starts moving upwards
towards the screen top.
2. Attach code to a key event: we need to choose a key on the keyboard that represents the player
shooting the laser.
3. Create a game object that looks like a laser when the key is pressed.

Cooldown on our laser

The laser needs to fire every time you press a key, like space for example. To prevent the game
producing way too many lasers in a short time we need to fix this. The fix is by implementing a so
called cooldown, a timer, that ensures that a laser can only be fired so often. You can implement that
in the following way:
javascript

class Cooldown {
constructor(time) {
this.cool = false;
setTimeout(() => {
this.cool = true;
}, time)
}
}

class Weapon {
constructor {
}
fire() {
if (!this.cooldown || this.cooldown.cool) {
// produce a laser
 this.cooldown = new Cooldown(500);
} else {
// do nothing - it hasn't cooled down yet.
}
}
}

✅ Refer to lesson 1 in the space game series to remind yourself about cooldowns.

What to build
You will take the existing code (which you should have cleaned up and refactored) from the previous
lesson, and extend it. Either start with the code from part II or use the code at Part III- starter.

tip: the laser that you'll work with is already in your assets folder and referenced by your code

Add collision detection, when a laser collides with something the following rules should apply:
1. Laser hits enemy: enemy dies if hit by a laser
2. Laser hits top screen: A laser is destroyed if it hits the top part of our screen
3. Enemy and hero collision: an enemy and the hero is destroyed if hitting each other
4. Enemy hits bottom of the screen: An enemy and a hero is destroyed if the enemy hits the
bottom of the screen

Recommended steps
Locate the files that have been created for you in the your-work sub folder. It should contain the
following:
bash

-| assets
-| enemyShip.png
-| player.png
-| laserRed.png
-| index.html
-| app.js
-| package.json
You start your project the your_work folder by typing:
bash

cd your-work
npm start

The above will start a HTTP Server on address http://localhost:5000 . Open up a browser
and input that address, right now it should render the hero and all the enemies, nothing is moving -
yet :).

Add code
1. Setup a rectangle representation of your game object, to handle collision The below code
allows you to get a rectangle representation of a GameObject . Edit your GameObject class to
extend it:
javascript

rectFromGameObject() {
return {
top: this.y,
left: this.x,
bottom: this.y + this.height,
right: this.x + this.width,
};
}

2. Add code that checks collision This will be a new function that tests whether two rectangles
intersect:
javascript

function intersectRect(r1, r2) {

return !(
r2.left > r1.right ||
r2.right < r1.left ||
r2.top > r1.bottom ||
r2.bottom < r1.top
);
}

3. Add laser firing capability

1. Add key-event message. The space key should create a laser just above the hero ship. Add
three constants in the Messages object:
javascript

KEY_EVENT_SPACE: "KEY_EVENT_SPACE",
COLLISION_ENEMY_LASER: "COLLISION_ENEMY_LASER",
COLLISION_ENEMY_HERO: "COLLISION_ENEMY_HERO",

2. Handle space key. Edit the window.addEventListener keyup function to handle spaces:
javascript

} else if(evt.keyCode === 32) {

eventEmitter.emit(Messages.KEY_EVENT_SPACE);
}

3. Add listeners. Edit the initGame() function to ensure that hero can fire when the space
bar is hit:
javascript

eventEmitter.on(Messages.KEY_EVENT_SPACE, () => {
if (hero.canFire()) {
hero.fire();
}

and add a new eventEmitter.on() function to ensure behavior when an enemy collides
with a laser:
javascript

eventEmitter.on(Messages.COLLISION_ENEMY_LASER, (_, { first, second }

first.dead = true;
second.dead = true;
})

4. Move object, Ensure the laser moves to the top of the screen gradually. You'll create a new
Laser class that extends GameObject , as you've done before:
javascript

class Laser extends GameObject {

constructor(x, y) {
super(x,y);
(this.width = 9), (this.height = 33);
this.type = 'Laser';
this.img = laserImg;
 let id = setInterval(() => {
if (this.y > 0) {
this.y -= 15;
} else {
this.dead = true;
clearInterval(id);
}
}, 100)
}
}

5. Handle collisions, Implement collision rules for the laser. Add an updateGameObjects()
function that tests colliding objects for hits
javascript
function updateGameObjects() {
const enemies = gameObjects.filter(go => go.type === 'Enemy');
const lasers = gameObjects.filter((go) => go.type === "Laser");
// laser hit something
lasers.forEach((l) => {
enemies.forEach((m) => {
if (intersectRect(l.rectFromGameObject(), m.rectFromGameObject(
eventEmitter.emit(Messages.COLLISION_ENEMY_LASER, {
first: l,
second: m,
});
}
});
});

gameObjects = gameObjects.filter(go => !go.dead);

}

Make sure to add updateGameObjects() into your game loop in window.onload .

6. Implement cooldown on the laser, so it can only be fired so often.
Finally, edit the Hero class so that it can cooldown:
javascript

class Hero extends GameObject {

constructor(x, y) {
super(x, y);
(this.width = 99), (this.height = 75);
 this.type = "Hero";
this.speed = { x: 0, y: 0 };
this.cooldown = 0;
}
fire() {
gameObjects.push(new Laser(this.x + 45, this.y - 10));
this.cooldown = 500;

let id = setInterval(() => {

if (this.cooldown > 0) {
this.cooldown -= 100;
} else {
clearInterval(id);
}
}, 200);
}
canFire() {
return this.cooldown === 0;
}
}

At this point, your game has some functionality! You can navigate with your arrow keys, fire a laser
with your space bar, and enemies disappear when you hit them. Well done!

🚀 Challenge
Add an explosion! Take a look at the game assets in the Space Art repo and try to add an explosion
when the laser hits an alien

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

Experiment with the intervals in your game thus far. What happens when you change them? Read
more about JavaScript timing events.

Assignment
Explore collisions

Build a Space Game Part 5: Scoring and

Lives
Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz
In this lesson, you'll learn how to add scoring to a game and calculate lives.

Draw text on the screen

To be able to display a game score on the screen, you'll need to know how to place text on the
screen. The answer is using the fillText() method on the canvas object. You can also control
other aspects like what font to use, the color of the text and even its alignment (left, right, center).
Below is some code drawing some text on the screen.
javascript

ctx.font = "30px Arial";

ctx.fillStyle = "red";
ctx.textAlign = "right";
ctx.fillText("show this on the screen", 0, 0);

✅ Read more about how to add text to a canvas, and feel free to make yours look fancier!

Life, as a game concept

The concept of having a life in a game is only a number. In the context of a space game it's common
to assign a set of lives that get deducted one by one when your ship takes damage. It's nice if you
can show a graphical representation of this like miniships or hearts instead of a number.

What to build
Let's add the following to your game:
Game score: For every enemy ship that is destroyed, the hero should be awarded some points,
we suggest a 100 points per ship. The game score should be shown in the bottom left.
Life: Your ship has three lives. You lose a life every time an enemy ship collides with you. A life
score should be displayed at the bottom right and be made out of the following graphic .

Recommended steps
Locate the files that have been created for you in the your-work sub folder. It should contain the
following:
bash

-| assets
-| enemyShip.png
-| player.png
-| laserRed.png
-| index.html
-| app.js
-| package.json

You start your project the your_work folder by typing:

bash

cd your-work
npm start

The above will start a HTTP Server on address http://localhost:5000 . Open up a browser
and input that address, right now it should render the hero and all the enemies, and as you hit your
left and right arrows, the hero moves and can shoot down enemies.
Add code
1. Copy over the needed assets from the solution/assets/ folder into your-work folder;
you will add a life.png asset. Add the lifeImg to the window.onload function:
javascript

lifeImg = await loadTexture("assets/life.png");

2. Add the lifeImg to the list of assets:

javascript

let heroImg,
...
lifeImg,
...
eventEmitter = new EventEmitter();

3. Add variables. Add code that represents your total score (0) and lives left (3), display these
scores on a screen.
4. Extend updateGameObjects() function. Extend the updateGameObjects() function to
handle enemy collisions:
javascript
enemies.forEach(enemy => {
const heroRect = hero.rectFromGameObject();
if (intersectRect(heroRect, enemy.rectFromGameObject())) {
eventEmitter.emit(Messages.COLLISION_ENEMY_HERO, { enemy });
}
})

5. Add life and points .

1. Initialize variables. Under this.cooldown = 0 in the Hero class, set life and points:
javascript

this.life = 3;
this.points = 0;

2. Draw variables on screen. Draw these values to screen:

 javascript

function drawLife() {
// TODO, 35, 27
const START_POS = canvas.width - 180;
for(let i=0; i < hero.life; i++ ) {
ctx.drawImage(
lifeImg,
START_POS + (45 * (i+1) ),
canvas.height - 37);
}
}

function drawPoints() {
ctx.font = "30px Arial";
ctx.fillStyle = "red";
ctx.textAlign = "left";
drawText("Points: " + hero.points, 10, canvas.height-20);
}

function drawText(message, x, y) {
ctx.fillText(message, x, y);
}

3. Add methods to Game loop. Make sure you add these functions to your window.onload
function under updateGameObjects() :
javascript

drawPoints();
drawLife();

6. Implement game rules. Implement the following game rules:

1. For every hero and enemy collision, deduct a life.
Extend the Hero class to do this deduction:
javascript

decrementLife() {
this.life--;
if (this.life === 0) {
this.dead = true;
}
}
 2. For every laser that hits an enemy, increase game score with a 100 points.
Extend the Hero class to do this increment:
javascript

incrementPoints() {
this.points += 100;
}

Add these functions to your Collision Event Emitters:

javascript

eventEmitter.on(Messages.COLLISION_ENEMY_LASER, (_, { first, second }

first.dead = true;
second.dead = true;
hero.incrementPoints();
})

eventEmitter.on(Messages.COLLISION_ENEMY_HERO, (_, { enemy }) => {

enemy.dead = true;
hero.decrementLife();
});

✅ Do a little research to discover other games that are created using JavaScript/Canvas. What are
their common traits?
By the end of this work, you should see the small 'life' ships at the bottom right, points at the bottom
left, and you should see your life count decrement as you collide with enemies and your points
increment when you shoot enemies. Well done! Your game is almost complete.

🚀 Challenge
Your code is almost complete. Can you envision your next steps?

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz
Review & Self Study
Research some ways that you can increment and decrement game scores and lives. There are some
interesting game engines like PlayFab. How could using one of these would enhance your game?

Assignment
Build a Scoring Game

Build a Space Game Part 6: End and

Restart
Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz
There are different ways to express and end condition in a game. It's up to you as the creator of the
game to say why the game has ended. Here are some reasons, if we assume we are talking about the
space game you have been building so far:
N Enemy ships have been destroyed: It's quite common if you divide up a game into different
levels that you need to destroy N Enemy ships to complete a level
Your ship has been destroyed: There are definitely games where you lose the game if your ship
is destroyed. Another common approach is that you have the concept of lives. Every time a your
ship is destroyed it deducts a life. Once all lives have been lost then you lose the game.
You've collected N points: Another common end condition is for you to collect points. How you
get points is up to you but it's quite common to assign points to various activities like destroying
an enemy ship or maybe collect items that items drop when they are destroyed.
Complete a level: This might involve several conditions such as X enemy ships destroyed, Y
points collected or maybe that a specific item has been collected.

Restarting
If people enjoy your game they are likely to want to replay it. Once the game ends for whatever
reason you should offer an alternative to restart.
✅ Think a bit about under what conditions you find a game ends, and then how you are prompted to
restart

What to build
You will be adding these rules to your game:
1. Winning the game. Once all enemy ships have been destroyed, you win the game. Additionally
display some kind of victory message.
2. Restart. Once all your lives are lost or the game is won, you should offer a way to restart the
game. Remember! You will need to reinitialize the game and the previous game state should be
cleared.

Recommended steps
Locate the files that have been created for you in the your-work sub folder. It should contain the
following:
bash

-| assets
-| enemyShip.png
-| player.png
-| laserRed.png
-| life.png
-| index.html
-| app.js
-| package.json

You start your project the your_work folder by typing:

bash

cd your-work
npm start

The above will start a HTTP Server on address http://localhost:5000 . Open up a browser
and input that address. Your game should be in a playable state.
 tip: to avoid warnings in Visual Studio Code, edit the window.onload function to call
gameLoopId as is (without let ), and declare the gameLoopId at the top of the file,
independently: let gameLoopId;

Add code
1. Track end condition. Add code that keeps track of the number of enemies, or if the hero ship has
been destroyedby adding these two functions:
javascript

function isHeroDead() {
return hero.life <= 0;
}

function isEnemiesDead() {
const enemies = gameObjects.filter((go) => go.type === "Enemy" && !go.
return enemies.length === 0;
}

2. Add logic to message handlers. Edit the eventEmitter to handle these conditions:
javascript

eventEmitter.on(Messages.COLLISION_ENEMY_LASER, (_, { first, second }) =

first.dead = true;
second.dead = true;
hero.incrementPoints();

if (isEnemiesDead()) {
eventEmitter.emit(Messages.GAME_END_WIN);
}
});

eventEmitter.on(Messages.COLLISION_ENEMY_HERO, (_, { enemy }) => {

enemy.dead = true;
hero.decrementLife();
if (isHeroDead()) {
eventEmitter.emit(Messages.GAME_END_LOSS);
return; // loss before victory
}
if (isEnemiesDead()) {
eventEmitter.emit(Messages.GAME_END_WIN);
 }
});

eventEmitter.on(Messages.GAME_END_WIN, () => {
endGame(true);
});

eventEmitter.on(Messages.GAME_END_LOSS, () => {
endGame(false);
});

3. Add new message types. Add these Messages to the constants object:
javascript

GAME_END_LOSS: "GAME_END_LOSS",
GAME_END_WIN: "GAME_END_WIN",

4. Add restart code code that restarts the game at the press of a selected button.
1. Listen to key press Enter . Edit your window's eventListener to listen for this press:
javascript

else if(evt.key === "Enter") {

eventEmitter.emit(Messages.KEY_EVENT_ENTER);
}

2. Add restart message. Add this Message to your Messages constant:

javascript

KEY_EVENT_ENTER: "KEY_EVENT_ENTER",

5. Implement game rules. Implement the following game rules:

1. Player win condition. When all enemy ships are destroyed, display a victory message.
1. First, create a displayMessage() function:
javascript

function displayMessage(message, color = "red") {

ctx.font = "30px Arial";
ctx.fillStyle = color;
ctx.textAlign = "center";
ctx.fillText(message, canvas.width / 2, canvas.height / 2);
}
 2. Create an endGame() function:
javascript

function endGame(win) {
clearInterval(gameLoopId);

// set a delay so we are sure any paints have finished

setTimeout(() => {
ctx.clearRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
ctx.fillStyle = "black";
ctx.fillRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
if (win) {
displayMessage(
"Victory!!! Pew Pew... - Press [Enter] to start a new game C
"green"
);
} else {
displayMessage(
"You died !!! Press [Enter] to start a new game Captain Pew
);
}
}, 200)
}

2. Restart logic. When all lives are lost or the player won the game, display that the game can be
restarted. Additionally restart the game when the restart key is hit (you can decide what key
should be mapped to restart).
1. Create the resetGame() function:
javascript

function resetGame() {
if (gameLoopId) {
clearInterval(gameLoopId);
eventEmitter.clear();
initGame();
gameLoopId = setInterval(() => {
ctx.clearRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
ctx.fillStyle = "black";
ctx.fillRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
drawPoints();
drawLife();
updateGameObjects();
 drawGameObjects(ctx);
}, 100);
}
}

3. Add a call to the eventEmitter to reset the game in initGame() :

javascript
eventEmitter.on(Messages.KEY_EVENT_ENTER, () => {
resetGame();
});

4. Add a clear() function to the EventEmitter:

javascript

clear() {
this.listeners = {};
}

👽 💥 🚀 Congratulations, Captain! Your game is complete! Well done! 🚀 💥 👽

🚀 Challenge
Add a sound! Can you add a sound to enhance your game play, maybe when there's a laser hit, or the
hero dies or wins? Have a look at this sandbox to learn how to play sound using JavaScript

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

Your assignment is to create a fresh sample game, so explore some of the interesting games out
there to see what type of game you might build.
Assignment
Build a Sample Game

Build a Banking App Part 1: HTML

Templates and Routes in a Web App
Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz

Introduction
Since the advent of JavaScript in browsers, websites are becoming more interactive and complex
than ever. Web technologies are now commonly used to create fully functional applications that runs
directly into a browser that we call web applications. As Web apps are highly interactive, users do not
want to wait for a full page reload every time an action is performed. That's why JavaScript is used to
update the HTML directly using the DOM, to provide a smoother user experience.
In this lesson, we're going to lay out the foundations to create bank web app, using HTML templates
to create multiple screens that can be displayed and updated without having to reload the entire
HTML page.

Prerequisite
You need a local web server to test the web app we'll build in this lesson. If don't have one, you can
install Node.js and use the command npx lite-server from your project folder. It will create a
local web server and open your app in a browser.

Preparation
On your computer, create a folder named bank with a file named index.html inside it. We'll
start from this HTML boilerplate:
 html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>Bank App</title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- This is where you'll work -->
</body>
</html>

HTML templates
If you want to create multiples screens for a web page, one solution would be to create one HTML file
for every screen you want to display. However, this solution comes with some inconvenience:
You have to reload the entire HTML when switching screen, which can be slow.
It's difficult to share data between the different screens.
Another approach is have only one HTML file, and define multiple HTML templates using the
<template> element. A template is a reusable HTML block that is not displayed by the browser,
and needs to be instantiated at runtime using JavaScript.

Task
We'll create a bank app with two screens: the login page and the dashboard. First, let's add in the
HTML body a placeholder element that we'll use to instantiate the different screens of our app:
html

<div id="app">Loading...</div>

We're giving it an id to make it easier to locate it with JavaScript later.

Tip: since the content of this element will be replaced, we can put in a loading message or
indicator that will be shown while the app is loading.
Next, let's add below the HTML template for the login page. For now we'll only put in there a title and
a section containing a link that we'll use to perform the navigation.
html

<template id="login">
<h1>Bank App</h1>
<section>
<a href="/dashboard">Login</a>
</section>
</template>

Then we'll add another HTML template for the dashboard page. This page will contain different
sections:
A header with a title and a logout link
The current balance of the bank account
A list of transactions, displayed in a table
html

<template id="dashboard">
<header>
<h1>Bank App</h1>
<a href="/login">Logout</a>
</header>
<section>
Balance: 100$
</section>
<section>
<h2>Transactions</h2>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Date</th>
<th>Object</th>
<th>Amount</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody></tbody>
</table>
</section>
</template>
 Tip: when creating HTML templates, if you want to see what it will look like, you can comment
out the <template> and </template> lines by enclosing them with <!-- --> .

✅ Why do you think we use id attributes on the templates? Could we use something else like
classes?

Displaying templates with JavaScript

If you try your current HTML file in a browser, you'll see that it get stuck displaying Loading... .
That's because we need to add some JavaScript code to instantiate and display the HTML templates.
Instantiating a template is usually done in 3 steps:
1. Retrieve the template element in the DOM, for example using document.getElementById .
2. Clone the template element, using cloneNode .
3. Attach it to the DOM under a visible element, for example using appendChild .
✅ Why do we need to clone the template before attaching it to the DOM? What do you think would
happen if we skipped this step?

Task
Create a new file named app.js in your project folder and import that file in the <head> section
of your HTML:
html

<script src="app.js" defer></script>

Now in app.js , we'll create a new function updateRoute :

js

function updateRoute(templateId) {
const template = document.getElementById(templateId);
const view = template.content.cloneNode(true);
const app = document.getElementById('app');
app.innerHTML = '';
app.appendChild(view);
}
What we do here is exactly the 3 steps described above. We instantiate the template with the id
templateId , and put its cloned content within our app placeholder. Note that we need to use
cloneNode(true) to copy the entire subtree of the template.

Now call this function with one of the template and look at the result.
js

updateRoute('login');

✅ What's the purpose of this code app.innerHTML = ''; ? What happens without it?

Creating routes
When talking about a web app, we call Routing the intent to map URLs to specific screens that
should be displayed. On a web site with multiple HTML files, this is done automatically as the file
paths are reflected on the URL. For example, with these files in your project folder:

mywebsite/index.html
mywebsite/login.html
mywebsite/admin/index.html

If you create a web server with mywebsite as the root, the URL mapping will be:

https://site.com --> mywebsite/index.html

https://site.com/login.html --> mywebsite/login.html
https://site.com/admin/ --> mywebsite/admin/index.html

However, for our web app we are using a single HTML file containing all the screens so this default
behavior won't help us. We have to create this map manually and perform update the displayed
template using JavaScript.

Task
We'll use a simple object to implement a map between URL paths and our templates. Add this object
at the top of your app.js file.
 js

const routes = {
'/login': { templateId: 'login' },
'/dashboard': { templateId: 'dashboard' },
};

Now let's modify a bit the updateRoute function. Instead of passing directly the templateId
as an argument, we want to retrieve it by first looking at the current URL, and then use our map to get
the corresponding template ID value. We can use window.location.pathname to get only the
path section from the URL.
js

function updateRoute() {
const path = window.location.pathname;
const route = routes[path];

const template = document.getElementById(route.templateId);

const view = template.content.cloneNode(true);
const app = document.getElementById('app');
app.innerHTML = '';
app.appendChild(view);
}

Here we mapped the routes we declared to the corresponding template. You can try it that it works
correctly by changing the URL manually in your browser.
✅ What happens if you enter an unknown path in the URL? How could we solve this?

Adding navigation
The next step for our app is to add the possibility to navigate between pages without having to
change the URL manually. This implies two things:
1. Updating the current URL
2. Updating the displayed template based on the new URL
We already took care of the second part with the updateRoute function, so we have to figure out
how to update the current URL.
We'll have to use JavaScript and more specifically the history.pushState that allows to update
the URL and create a new entry in the browsing history, without reloading the HTML.
 Note: While the HTML anchor element <a href> can be used on its own to create
hyperlinks to different URLs, it will make the browser reload the HTML by default. It is
necessary to prevent this behavior when handling routing with custom javascript, using the
preventDefault() function on the click event.

Task
Let's create a new function we can use to navigate in our app:
js

function navigate(path) {
window.history.pushState({}, path, path);
updateRoute();
}

This method first updates the current URL based on the path given, then updates the template. The
property window.location.origin returns the URL root, allowing us to reconstruct a complete
URL from a given path.
Now that we have this function, we can take care of the problem we have if a path does not match
any defined route. We'll modify the updateRoute function by adding a fallback to one of the
existing route if we can't find a match.
js

function updateRoute() {
const path = window.location.pathname;
const route = routes[path];

if (!route) {
return navigate('/login');
}

...

If a route cannot be found, we'll now redirect to the login page.

Now let's create a function to get the URL when a link is clicked, and to prevent the browser's default
link behavior:
 js

function onLinkClick(event) {
event.preventDefault();
navigate(event.target.href);
}

Let's complete the navigation system by adding bindings to our Login and Logout links in the HTML.
html

<a href="/dashboard" onclick="onLinkClick(event)">Login</a>

...
<a href="/login" onclick="onLinkClick(event)">Logout</a>

The event object above, captures the click event and passes it to our onLinkClick
function.
Using the onclick attribute bind the click event to JavaScript code, here the call to the
navigate() function.

Try clicking on these links, you should be now able to navigate between the different screens of your
app.
✅ The history.pushState method is part of the HTML5 standard and implemented in all
modern browsers. If you're building a web app for older browsers, there's a trick you can use in place
of this API: using a hash ( # ) before the path you can implement routing that works with regular
anchor navigation and does not reload the page, as it's purpose was to create internal links within a
page.

Handling the browser's back and forward buttons

Using the history.pushState creates new entries in the browser's navigation history. You can
check that by holding the back button of your browser, it should display something like this:
If you try clicking on the back button a few times, you'll see that the current URL changes and the
history is updated, but the same template keeps being displayed.
That's because the application does not know that we need to call updateRoute() every time the
history changes. If you take a look at the history.pushState documentation, you can see that if
the state changes - meaning that we moved to a different URL - the popstate event is triggered.
We'll use that to fix that issue.

Task
To make sure the displayed template is updated when the browser history changes, we'll attach a
new function that calls updateRoute() . We'll do that at the bottom of our app.js file:
js

window.onpopstate = () => updateRoute();

updateRoute();

Note: we used an arrow function here to declare our popstate event handler for
conciseness, but a regular function would work the same.

Here's a refresher video on arrow functions:

 🎥 Click the image above for a video about arrow functions.

Now try to use the back and forward buttons of your browsers, and check that the displayed route is
correctly updated this time.

🚀 Challenge
Add a new template and route for a third page that shows the credits for this app.

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

Routing is one of the surprisingly tricky parts of web development, especially as the web moves from
page refresh behaviors to Single Page Application page refreshes. Read a little about how the Azure
Static Web App service handles routing. Can you explain why some of the decisions described on
that document are necessary?

Assignment
Improve the routing

Build a Banking App Part 2: Build a Login

and Registration Form
Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz

Introduction
In almost all modern web apps, you can create an account to have your own private space. As
multiple users can access a web app at the same time, you need a mechanism to store each user
personal data separately and select which information to display information. We won't cover how to
manage user identity securely as it's an extensive topic on its own, but we'll make sure each user is
able to create one (or more) bank account on our app.
In this part we'll use HTML forms to add login and registration to our web app. We'll see how to send
the data to a server API programmatically, and ultimately how to define basic validation rules for user
inputs.

Prerequisite
You need to have completed the HTML templates and routing of the web app for this lesson. You also
need to install Node.js and run the server API locally so you can send data to create accounts.
Take note You will have two terminals running at the same time as listed below.
1. For the the main bank app we built in the HTML templates and routing lesson
2. For the Bank APP server API we just setup above.
You need two of the servers up and running to follow through with the rest of the lesson. They are
listening on different ports(port 3000 and port 5000 ) so everything should work just fine.
You can test that the server is running properly by executing this command in a terminal:
sh

curl http://localhost:5000/api
# -> should return "Bank API v1.0.0" as a result

Form and controls

The <form> element encapsulates a section of an HTML document where the user can input and
submit data with interactive controls. There are all sorts of user interface (UI) controls that can be
used within a form, the most common one being the <input> and the <button> elements.
There are a lot of different types of <input> , for example to create a field where the user can enter
its username you can use:
html

<input id="username" name="username" type="text">

The name attribute will be used as the property name when the form data will be sent over. The
id attribute is used to associate a <label> with the form control.

Take a look at the whole list of <input> types and other form controls to get an idea of all
the native UI elements you can use when building your UI.

✅ Note that <input> is an empty element on which you should not add a matching closing tag.
You can however use the self-closing <input/> notation, but it's not required.
The <button> element within a form is a bit special. If you do not specify its type attribute, it
will automatically submit the form data to the server when pressed. Here are the possible type
values:
submit : The default within a <form> , the button triggers the form submit action.
reset : The button resets all the form controls to their initial values.
 button : Do not assign a default behavior when the button is pressed. You can then assign
custom actions to it using JavaScript.

Task
Let's start by adding a form to the login template. We'll need a username field and a Login button.
html

<template id="login">
<h1>Bank App</h1>
<section>
<h2>Login</h2>
<form id="loginForm">
<label for="username">Username</label>
<input id="username" name="user" type="text">
<button>Login</button>
</form>
</section>
</template>

If you take a closer look, you can notice that we also added a <label> element here. <label>
elements are used to add a name to UI controls, such as our username field. Labels are important for
the readability of your forms, but also comes with additional benefits:
By associating a label to a form control, it helps users using assistive technologies (like a screen
reader) to understand what data they're expected to provide.
You can click on the label to directly put focus on the associated input, making it easier to reach
on touch-screen based devices.

Accessibility on the web is a very important topic that's often overlooked. Thanks to semantic
HTML elements it's not difficult to create accessible content if you use them properly. You can
read more about accessibility to avoid common mistakes and become a responsible
developer.

Now we'll add a second form for the registration, just below the previous one:
html

<hr/>
<h2>Register</h2>
<form id="registerForm">
 <label for="user">Username</label>
<input id="user" name="user" type="text">
<label for="currency">Currency</label>
<input id="currency" name="currency" type="text" value="$">
<label for="description">Description</label>
<input id="description" name="description" type="text">
<label for="balance">Current balance</label>
<input id="balance" name="balance" type="number" value="0">
<button>Register</button>
</form>

Using the value attribute we can define a default value for a given input. Notice also that the input
for balance has the number type. Does it look different than the other inputs? Try interacting
with it.
✅ Can you navigate and interact with the forms using only a keyboard? How would you do that?

Submitting data to the server

Now that we have a functional UI, the next step is to send the data over to our server. Let's make a
quick test using our current code: what happens if you click on the Login or Register button?
Did you notice the change in your browser's URL section?

The default action for a <form> is to submit the form to the current server URL using the GET
method, appending the form data directly to the URL. This method has some shortcomings though:
The data sent is very limited in size (about 2000 characters)
The data is directly visible in the URL (not great for passwords)
It does not work with file uploads
That's why you can change it to use the POST method which sends the form data to the server in the
body of the HTTP request, without any of the previous limitations.

While POST is the most commonly used method to send data over, in some specific scenarios
it is preferable to use the GET method, when implementing a search field for example.
Task
Add action and method properties to the registration form:
html

<form id="registerForm" action="//localhost:5000/api/accounts" method="POST

Now try to register a new account with your name. After clicking on the Register button you should
see something like this:

If everything goes well, the server should answer your request with a JSON response containing the
account data that was created.
✅ Try registering again with the same name. What happens?

Submitting data without reloading the page

As you probably noticed, there's a slight issue with the approach we just used: when submitting the
form, we get out of our app and the browser redirects to the server URL. We're trying to avoid all
page reloads with our web app, as we're makng a Single-page application (SPA).
To send the form data to the server without forcing a page reload, we have to use JavaScript code.
Instead of putting an URL in the action property of a <form> element, you can use any
JavaScript code prepended by the javascript: string to perform a custom action. Using this
also means that you'll have to implement some tasks that were previously done automatically by the
browser:
Retrieve the form data
 Convert and encode the form data to a suitable format
Create the HTTP request and send it to the server

Task
Replace the registration form action with:
html

<form id="registerForm" action="javascript:register()">

Open app.js add a new function named register :

js

function register() {
const registerForm = document.getElementById('registerForm');
const formData = new FormData(registerForm);
const data = Object.fromEntries(formData);
const jsonData = JSON.stringify(data);
}

Here we retrieve the form element using getElementById() and use the FormData helper to
extract the values from form controls as a set of key/value pairs. Then we convert the data to a
regular object using Object.fromEntries() and finally serialize the data to JSON, a format
commonly used for exchanging data on the web.
The data is now ready to be sent to the server. Create a new function named createAccount :
js
async function createAccount(account) {
try {
const response = await fetch('//localhost:5000/api/accounts', {
method: 'POST',
headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
body: account
});
return await response.json();
} catch (error) {
return { error: error.message || 'Unknown error' };
}
}
What's this function doing? First, notice the async keyword here. This means that the function
contains code that will execute asynchronously. When used along the await keyword, it allows
waiting for asynchronous code to execute - like waiting for the server response here - before
continuing.
Here's a quick video about async/await usage:

🎥 Click the image above for a video about async/await.

We use the fetch() API to send JSON data to the server. This method takes 2 parameters:
The URL of the server, so we put back //localhost:5000/api/accounts here.
The settings of the request. That's where we set the method to POST and provide the body
for the request. As we're sending JSON data to the server, we also need to set the
Content-Type header to application/json so the server know how to interpret the
content.
As the server will respond to the request with JSON, we can use await response.json() to
parse the JSON content and return the resulting object. Note that this method is asynchronous, so
we use the await keyword here before returning to make sure any errors during parsing are also
caught.
Now add some code to the register function to call createAccount() :
js

const result = await createAccount(jsonData);

Because we use the await keyword here, we need to add the async keyword before the
register function:
js

async function register() {

Finally, let's add some logs to check the result. The final function should look like this:
js

async function register() {

const registerForm = document.getElementById('registerForm');
const formData = new FormData(registerForm);
const jsonData = JSON.stringify(Object.fromEntries(formData));
const result = await createAccount(jsonData);

if (result.error) {
return console.log('An error occurred:', result.error);
}

console.log('Account created!', result);

}

That was a bit long but we got there! If you open your browser developer tools, and try registering a
new account, you should not see any change on the web page but a message will appear in the
console confirming that everything works.

✅ Do you think the data is sent to the server securely? What if someone what was able to intercept
the request? You can read about HTTPS to know more about secure data communication.

Data validation
If you try to register a new account without setting an username first, you can see that the server
returns an error with status code 400 (Bad Request).
Before sending data to a server it's a good practice to validate the form data beforehand when
possible, to make sure you send a valid request. HTML5 forms controls provides built-in validation
using various attributes:
required : the field needs to be filled otherwise the form cannot be submitted.
minlength and maxlength : defines the minimum and maximum number of characters in
text fields.
min and max : defines the minimum and maximum value of a numerical field.
type : defines the kind of data expected, like number , email , file or other built-in
types. This attribute may also change the visual rendering of the form control.
pattern : allows to define a regular expression pattern to test if the entered data is valid or not.

Tip: you can customize the look of your form controls depending if they're valid or not using
the :valid and :invalid CSS pseudo-classes.

Task
There are 2 required fields to create a valid new account, the username and currency, the other fields
being optional. Update the form's HTML, using both the required attribute and text in the field's
label to that:
html

<label for="user">Username (required)</label>

<input id="user" name="user" type="text" required>
...
<label for="currency">Currency (required)</label>
<input id="currency" name="currency" type="text" value="$" required>

While this particular server implementation does not enforce specific limits on the fields maximum
length, it's always a good practice to define reasonable limits for any user text entry.
Add a maxlength attribute to the text fields:
html

<input id="user" name="user" type="text" maxlength="20" required>

...
<input id="currency" name="currency" type="text" value="$" maxlength="5" re
...
<input id="description" name="description" type="text" maxlength="100">
Now if you press the Register button and a field does not respect a validation rule we defined, you
should see something like this:

Validation like this performed before sending any data to the server is called client-side validation.
But note that's it's not always possible to peform all checks without sending the data. For example,
we cannot check here if an account already exists with the same username without sending a request
to the server. Additional validation performed on the server is called server-side validation.
Usually both need to be implemented, and while using client-side validation improves the user
experience by providing instant feedback to the user, server-side validation is crucial to make sure
the user data you manipulate is sound and safe.

🚀 Challenge
Show an error message in the HTML if the user already exists.
Here's an example of what the final login page can look like after a bit of styling:
Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Review & Self Study

Developers have gotten very creative about their form building efforts, especially regarding validation
strategies. Learn about different form flows by looking through CodePen; can you find some
interesting and inspiring forms?

Assignment
Style your bank app
Build a Banking App Part 3: Methods of
Fetching and Using Data
Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz

Introduction
At the core of every web application there's data. Data can take many forms, but its main purpose is
always to display information to the user. With web apps becoming increasingly interactive and
complex, how the user accesses and interacts with information is now a key part of web
development.
In this lesson, we'll see how to fetch data from a server asynchronously, and use this data to display
information on a web page without reloading the HTML.

Prerequisite
You need to have built the Login and Registration Form part of the web app for this lesson. You also
need to install Node.js and run the server API locally so you get account data.
You can test that the server is running properly by executing this command in a terminal:
sh

curl http://localhost:5000/api
# -> should return "Bank API v1.0.0" as a result

AJAX and data fetching

Traditional web sites update the content displayed when the user selects a link or submits data using
a form, by reloading the full HTML page. Every time new data needs to be loaded, the web server
returns a brand new HTML page that needs to be processed by the browser, interrupting the current
user action and limiting interactions during the reload. This workflow is also called a Multi-Page
Application or MPA.

When web applications started to become more complex and interactive, a new technique called
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) emerged. This technique allows web apps to send and
retrieve data from a server asynchronously using JavaScript, without having to reload the HTML
page, resulting in faster updates and smoother user interactions. When new data is received from the
server, the current HTML page can also be updated with JavaScript using the DOM API. Over time,
this approach has evolved into what is now called a Single-Page Application or SPA.

When AJAX was first introduced, the only API available to fetch data asynchronously was
XMLHttpRequest . But modern browsers now also implement the more convenient and powerful
Fetch API, which uses promises and is better suited to manipulate JSON data.

While all modern browsers support the Fetch API , if you want your web application to
work on legacy or old browsers it's always a good idea to check the compatibility table on
caniuse.com first.

Task
In the previous lesson we implemented the registration form to create an account. We'll now add
code to login using an existing account, and fetch its data. Open the app.js file and add a new
 login function:
js

async function login() {

const loginForm = document.getElementById('loginForm')
const user = loginForm.user.value;
}

Here we start by retrieving the form element with getElementById() , and then we get the
username from the input with loginForm.user.value . Every form control can be accessed by
its name (set in the HTML using the name attribute) as a property of the form.
In a similar fashion to what we did for the registration, we'll create another function to perform a
server request, but this time for retrieving the account data:
js

async function getAccount(user) {

try {
const response = await fetch('//localhost:5000/api/accounts/' + encodeU
return await response.json();
} catch (error) {
return { error: error.message || 'Unknown error' };
}
}

We use the fetch API to request the data asynchronously from the server, but this time we don't
need any extra parameters other than the URL to call, as we're only querying data. By default,
fetch creates a GET HTTP request, which is what we are seeking here.

✅ encodeURIComponent() is a function that escapes special characters for URL. What issues
could we possibly have if we do not call this function and use directly the user value in the URL?
Let's now update our login function to use getAccount :
js
async function login() {
const loginForm = document.getElementById('loginForm')
const user = loginForm.user.value;
const data = await getAccount(user);

if (data.error) {
return console.log('loginError', data.error);
}
 account = data;
navigate('/dashboard');
}

First, as getAccount is an asynchronous function we need to match it with the await keyword
to wait for the server result. As with any server request, we also have to deal with error cases. For
now we'll only add a log message to display the error, and come back to it later.
Then we have to store the data somewhere so we can later use it to display the dashboard
informations. Since the account variable does not exist yet, we'll create a global variable for it at
the top of our file:
js

let account = null;

After the user data is saved into a variable we can navigate from the login page to the dashboard
using the navigate() function we already have.
Finally, we need to call our login function when the login form is submitted, by modifying the
HTML:
html

<form id="loginForm" action="javascript:login()">

Test that everything is working correctly by registering a new account and trying to login using the
same account.
Before moving on to the next part, we can also complete the register function by adding this at
the bottom of the function:
js
account = result;
navigate('/dashboard');

✅ Did you know that by default, you can only call server APIs from the same domain and port than
the web page you are viewing? This is security mechanism enforced by browsers. But wait, our web
app is running on localhost:3000 whereas the server API is running on localhost:5000 ,
why does it work? By using a technique called Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), it is possible
to perform cross-origin HTTP requests if the server adds special headers to the response, allowing
exceptions for specific domains.
 Learn more about APIs by taking this lesson

Update HTML to display data

Now that we have the user data, we have to update the existing HTML to display it. We already know
how to retrieve an element from the DOM using for example document.getElementById() .
After you have a base element, here are some APIs you can use to modify it or add child elements to
it:
Using the textContent property you can change the text of an element. Note that changing
this value removes all the element's children (if there's any) and replaces it with the text provided.
As such, it's also an efficient method to remove all children of a given element by assigning an
empty string '' to it.
Using document.createElement() along with the append() method you can create and
attach one or more new child elements.
✅ Using the innerHTML property of an element it's also possible to change its HTML contents,
but this one should be avoided as it's vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

Task
Before moving on to the dashboard screen, there's one more thing we should do on the login page.
Currently, if you try to login with a username that does not exist, a message is shown in the console
but for a normal user nothing changes and you don't know what's going on.
Let's add a placeholder element in the login form where we can display an error message if needed. A
good place would be just before the login <button> :
html

...
<div id="loginError"></div>
<button>Login</button>
...

This <div> element is empty, meaning that nothing will be displayed on the screen until we add
some content to it. We also give it an id so we can retrieve it easily with JavaScript.
Go back to the app.js file and create a new helper function updateElement :
 js

function updateElement(id, text) {

const element = document.getElementById(id);
element.textContent = text;
}

This one is quite straightforward: given an element id and text, it will update the text content of the
DOM element with the matching id . Let's use this method in place of the previous error message
in the login function:
js

if (data.error) {
return updateElement('loginError', data.error);
}

Now if you try to login with an invalid account, you should see something like this:

Now we have error text that shows up visually, but if you try it with a screen reader you'll notice that
nothing is announced. In order for text that is dynamically added to a page to be announced by
screen readers, it will need to use something called a Live Region. Here we're going to use a specific
type of live region called an alert:
html

<div id="loginError" role="alert"></div>

Implement the same behavior for the register function errors (don't forget to update the HTML).

Display information on the dashboard

Using the same techniques we've just seen, we'll also take care of displaying the account information
on the dashboard page.
This is what an account object received from the server looks like:
 json

{
"user": "test",
"currency": "$",
"description": "Test account",
"balance": 75,
"transactions": [
{ "id": "1", "date": "2020-10-01", "object": "Pocket money", "amount":
{ "id": "2", "date": "2020-10-03", "object": "Book", "amount": -10 },
{ "id": "3", "date": "2020-10-04", "object": "Sandwich", "amount": -5 }
],
}

Note: to make your life easier, you can use the pre-existing test account that's already
populated with data.

Task
Let's start by replacing the "Balance" section in the HTML to add placeholder elements:
html

<section>
Balance: <span id="balance"></span><span id="currency"></span>
</section>

We'll also add a new section just below to display the account description:
html
<h2 id="description"></h2>

✅ Since the account description functions as a title for the content underneath it, it is marked up
semantically as a heading. Learn more about how heading structure is important for accessibility, and
take a critical look at the page to determine what else could be a heading.
Next, we'll create a new function in app.js to fill in the placeholder:
js

function updateDashboard() {
if (!account) {
return navigate('/login');
 }

updateElement('description', account.description);
updateElement('balance', account.balance.toFixed(2));
updateElement('currency', account.currency);
}

First, we check that we have the account data we need before going further. Then we use the
updateElement() function we created earlier to update the HTML.

To make the balance display prettier, we use the method toFixed(2) to force displaying
the value with 2 digits after the decimal point.

Now we need to call our updateDashboard() function everytime the dashboard is loaded. If you
already finished the lesson 1 assignment this should be straighforward, otherwise you can use the
following implementation.
Add this code to the end of the updateRoute() function:
js
if (typeof route.init === 'function') {
route.init();
}

And update the routes definition with:

js

const routes = {
'/login': { templateId: 'login' },
'/dashboard': { templateId: 'dashboard', init: updateDashboard }
};

With this change, every time the dashboard page is displayed, the function updateDashboard()
is called. After a login, you should then be able to see the account balance, currency and description.

Create table rows dynamically with HTML templates

In the first lesson we used HTML templates along with the appendChild() method to implement
the navigation in our app. Templates can also be smaller and used to dynamically populate repetitive
parts of a page.
We'll use a similar approach to display the list of transactions in the HTML table.

Task
Add a new template in the HTML <body> :
html

<template id="transaction">
<tr>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</template>

This template represents a single table row, with the 3 columns we want to populate: date, object and
amount of a transaction.
Then, add this id property to the <tbody> element of the table within the dashboard template
to make it easier to find using JavaScript:
html

<tbody id="transactions"></tbody>

Our HTML is ready, let's switch to JavaScript code and create a new function
createTransactionRow :

js
function createTransactionRow(transaction) {
const template = document.getElementById('transaction');
const transactionRow = template.content.cloneNode(true);
const tr = transactionRow.querySelector('tr');
tr.children[0].textContent = transaction.date;
tr.children[1].textContent = transaction.object;
tr.children[2].textContent = transaction.amount.toFixed(2);
return transactionRow;
}
This function does exactly what its names implies: using the template we created earlier, it creates a
new table row and fills in its contents using transaction data. We'll use this in our
updateDashboard() function to populate the table:

js

const transactionsRows = document.createDocumentFragment();

for (const transaction of account.transactions) {
const transactionRow = createTransactionRow(transaction);
transactionsRows.appendChild(transactionRow);
}
updateElement('transactions', transactionsRows);

Here we use the method document.createDocumentFragment() that creates a new DOM

fragment on which we can work, before finally attaching it to our HTML table.
There's still one more thing we have to do before this code can work, as our updateElement()
function currently supports text content only. Let's change its code a bit:
js

function updateElement(id, textOrNode) {

const element = document.getElementById(id);
element.textContent = ''; // Removes all children
element.append(textOrNode);
}

We use the append() method as it allows to attach either text or DOM Nodes to a parent element,
which is perfect for all our use cases.
If you try using the test account to login, you should now see a transaction list on the dashboard
🎉.

🚀 Challenge
Work together to make the dashboard page look like a real banking app. If you already styled your
app, try to use media queries to create a responsive design working nicely on both desktop and
mobile devices.
Here's an example of a styled dashboard page:
Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Assignment
Refactor and comment your code

Build a Banking App Part 4: Concepts of

State Management
Pre-Lecture Quiz
Pre-lecture quiz
Introduction
As a web application grows, it becomes a challenge to keep track of all data flows. Which code gets
the data, what page consumes it, where and when does it need to be updated...it's easy to end up
with messy code that's difficult to maintain. This is especially true when you need to share data
among different pages of your app, for example user data. The concept of state management has
always existed in all kinds of programs, but as web apps keep growing in complexity it's now a key
point to think about during development.
In this final part, we'll look over the app we built to rethink how the state is managed, allowing support
for browser refresh at any point, and persisting data across user sessions.

Prerequisite
You need to have completed the data fetching part of the web app for this lesson. You also need to
install Node.js and run the server API locally so you can manage account data.
You can test that the server is running properly by executing this command in a terminal:
sh

curl http://localhost:5000/api
# -> should return "Bank API v1.0.0" as a result

Rethink state management

In the previous lesson, we introduced a basic concept of state in our app with the global account
variable which contains the bank data for the currently logged in user. However, our current
implementation has some flaws. Try refreshing the page when you're on the dashboard. What
happens?
There's 3 issues with the current code:
The state is not persisted, as a browser refresh takes you back to the login page.
There are multiple functions that modify the state. As the app grows, it can make it difficult to
track the changes and it's easy to forget updating one.
The state is not cleaned up, so when you click on Logout the account data is still there even
though you're on the login page.
We could update our code to tackle these issues one by one, but it would create more code
duplication and make the app more complex and difficult to maintain. Or we could pause for a few
minutes and rethink our strategy.

What problems are we really trying to solve here?

State management is all about finding a good approach to solve these two particular problems:
How to keep the data flows in an app understandable?
How to keep the state data always in sync with the user interface (and vice versa)?
Once you've taken care of these, any other issues you might have may either be fixed already or have
become easier to fix. There are many possible approaches for solving these problems, but we'll go
with a common solution that consists of centralizing the data and the ways to change it. The data
flows would go like this:

We won't cover here the part where the data automatically triggers the view update, as it's
tied to more advanced concepts of Reactive Programming. It's a good follow-up subject if
you're up to a deep dive.

✅ There are a lot of libraries out there with different approaches to state management, Redux being
a popular option. Take a look at the concepts and patterns used as it's often a good way to learn what
potential issues you may be facing in large web apps and how it can be solved.

Task
We'll start with a bit of refactoring. Replace the account declaration:
js

let account = null;

With:
js

let state = {
account: null
};

The idea is to centralize all our app data in a single state object. We only have account for now in
the state so it doesn't change much, but it creates a path for evolutions.
We also have to update the functions using it. In the register() and login() functions,
replace account = ... with state.account = ... ;
At the top of the updateDashboard() function, add this line:
js

const account = state.account;

This refactoring by itself did not bring much improvements, but the idea was to lay out the foundation
for the next changes.

Track data changes

Now that we have put in place the state object to store our data, the next step is centralize the
updates. The goal is to make it easier to keep track of any changes and when they happen.
To avoid having changes made to the state object, it's also a good practice to consider it
immutable, meaning that it cannot be modified at all. It also means that you have to create a new
state object if you want to change anything in it. By doing this, you build a protection about potentially
unwanted side effects, and open up possibilities for new features in your app like implementing
undo/redo, while also making it easier to debug. For example, you could log every change made to
the state and keep a history of the changes to understand the source of a bug.
In JavaScript, you can use Object.freeze() to create an immutable version of an object. If you
try to make changes to an immutable object, an exception will be raised.
✅ Do you know the difference between a shallow and a deep immutable object? You can read about
it here.

Task
Let's create a new updateState() function:
js

function updateState(property, newData) {

state = Object.freeze({
...state,
[property]: newData
});
}

In this function, we're creating a new state object and copy data from the previous state using the
spread ( ... ) operator. Then we override a particular property of the state object with the new data
using the bracket notation [property] for assignment. Finally, we lock the object to prevent
modifications using Object.freeze() . We only have the account property stored in the state
for now, but with this approach you can add as many properties as you need in the state.
We'll also update the state initialization to make sure the initial state is frozen too:
js

let state = Object.freeze({

account: null
});

After that, update the register function by replacing the state.account = result;
assignment with:
js
updateState('account', result);

Do the same with the login function, replacing state.account = data; with:
js

updateState('account', data);

We'll now take the chance to fix the issue of account data not being cleared when the user clicks on
Logout.
Create a new function logout() :
js

function logout() {
updateState('account', null);
navigate('/login');
}

In updateDashboard() , replace the redirection return navigate('/login'); with

return logout() ;
Try registering a new account, logging out and in again to check that everything still works correctly.

Tip: you can take a look at all state changes by adding console.log(state) at the
bottom of updateState() and opening up the console in your browser's development
tools.

Persist the state

Most web apps needs to persist data to be able to work correctly. All the critical data is usually stored
on a database and accessed via a server API, like as the user account data in our case. But
sometimes, it's also interesting to persist some data on the client app that's running in your browser,
for a better user experience or to improve loading performance.
When you want to persist data in your browser, there are a few important questions you should ask
yourself:
Is the data sensitive? You should avoid storing any sensitive data on client, such as user
passwords.
For how long do you need to keep this data? Do you plan to access this data only for the current
session or do you want it to be stored forever?
There are multiple ways of storing information inside a web app, depending on what you want to
achieve. For example, you can use the URLs to store a search query, and make it shareable between
users. You can also use HTTP cookies if the data needs to be shared with the server, like
authentication information.
Another option is to use one of the many browser APIs for storing data. Two of them are particularly
interesting:
 localStorage : a Key/Value store allowing to persist data specific to the current web site
across different sessions. The data saved in it never expires.
sessionStorage : this one is works the same as localStorage except that the data stored
in it is cleared when the session ends (when the browser is closed).
Note that both these APIs only allow to store strings. If you want to store complex objects, you will
need to serialize it to the JSON format using JSON.stringify() .
✅ If you want to create a web app that does not work with a server, it's also possible to create a
database on the client using the IndexedDB API. This one is reserved for advanced use cases or if
you need to store significant amount of data, as it's more complex to use.

Task
We want our users stay logged in until they explicitly click on the Logout button, so we'll use
localStorage to store the account data. First, let's define a key that we'll use to store our data.

js

const storageKey = 'savedAccount';

Then add this line at the end of the updateState() function:

js

localStorage.setItem(storageKey, JSON.stringify(state.account));

With this, the user account data will be persisted and always up-to-date as we centralized previously
all our state updates. This is where we begin to benefit from all our previous refactors 🙂 .
As the data is saved, we also have to take care of restoring it when the app is loaded. Since we'll
begin to have more initialization code it may be a good idea to create a new init function, that
also includes our previous code at the bottom of app.js :
js
function init() {
const savedAccount = localStorage.getItem(storageKey);
if (savedAccount) {
updateState('account', JSON.parse(savedAccount));
}

// Our previous initialization code

window.onpopstate = () => updateRoute();
updateRoute();
}
 init();

Here we retrieve the saved data, and if there's any we update the state accordingly. It's important to
do this before updating the route, as there might be code relying on the state during the page
update.
We can also make the Dashboard page our application default page, as we are now persisting the
account data. If no data is found, the dashboard takes care of redirecting to the Login page anyways.
In updateRoute() , replace the fallback return navigate('/login'); with
return navigate('/dashboard'); .

Now login in the app and try refreshing the page. You should stay on the dashboard. With that update
we've taken care of all our initial issues...

Refresh the data

...But we might also have a created a new one. Oops!
Go to the dashboard using the test account, then run this command on a terminal to create a new
transaction:
sh

curl --request POST \

--header "Content-Type: application/json" \
--data "{ \"date\": \"2020-07-24\", \"object\": \"Bought book\", \"amo
http://localhost:5000/api/accounts/test/transactions

Try refreshing your the dashboard page in the browser now. What happens? Do you see the new
transaction?
The state is persisted indefinitely thanks to the localStorage , but that also means it's never
updated until you log out of the app and log in again!
One possible strategy to fix that is to reload the account data every time the dashboard is loaded, to
avoid stall data.

Task
Create a new function updateAccountData :
 js

async function updateAccountData() {

const account = state.account;
if (!account) {
return logout();
}

const data = await getAccount(account.user);

if (data.error) {
return logout();
}

updateState('account', data);
}

This method checks that we are currently logged in then reloads the account data from the server.
Create another function named refresh :
js

async function refresh() {

await updateAccountData();
updateDashboard();
}

This one updates the account data, then takes care of updating the HTML of the dashboard page. It's
what we need to call when the dashboard route is loaded. Update the route definition with:
js
const routes = {
'/login': { templateId: 'login' },
'/dashboard': { templateId: 'dashboard', init: refresh }
};

Try reloading the dashboard now, it should display the updated account data.

🚀 Challenge
Now that we reload the account data every time the dashboard is loaded, do you think we still need to
persist all the account data?
Try working together to change what is saved and loaded from localStorage to only include
what is absolutely required for the app to work.

Post-Lecture Quiz
Post-lecture quiz

Assignment
Implement "Add transaction" dialog
Here's an example result after completing the assignment: