Less full-featured app available?

[cefn]

zza-node-mongo looks like a full-featured application, which is a great reference, but I wonder if there's an alternate 'minimal' application which might be really valuable too, where it does nothing more than demonstrate accessing, querying and saving using Node and MongoDB with the minimum of UI.

A minimal app, maybe not even SPA would help me filter out the 33 javascript files referenced in the index.html file alone, and identify which ones are truly fundamental to using the breeze API. Alternatively an app which incrementally demonstrates the progression from using Breeze with Mongodb in a simple and raw form, through using it with angular, through using it with angular and bootstrap, through adding SPA routing etc. etc. but maybe something much simpler than Zza! even when it's complete.

I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot from this app, but I fear a large majority of my time will be learning about the overall architectural strategy you've chosen, as well as the application details, rather than the Breeze API itself, which could be somewhat lost among this complexity. Is there a chance of an app which does a lot less, but with the same technologies? Is that already in existence somewhere?

[wardbell]

You might learn something from the tests.

[ThomasBurleson]

@cefn

Significant effort has been invested into Zza to present a reasonable, full-stack (MEAN-Breeze) solution that is clear and [relatively] easy to follow. In fact, @wardbell and I both created versions to demonstrate ideas and approaches.

Our goals was to provide a worthwhile reference solution [for the developer community] that supports organization by features, modules, animation, ORM, and AngularJS best practices... But all these mean that the application may appear overwhelming at first.

We recommend should either attend an IdeaBlade training class (which may be best to truly learn all about the ORM) or have some experience with AngularJS and slowly explore the app and source. For example, start learning:

• how the Customer views are composed,
• how the Customer data is loaded
• etc.

I also recommend another fork of the ZZa Mean project. See how the SessionController initializes the ORM and loads global product information.

[cefn]

@ThomasBurleson sorry not to be clear. I'm not really interested in learning about the app, or the technologies you've selected to implement it though I admire them from afar. The query-oriented, client-side javascript access to a Mongo database offered by BreezeJS is extremely interesting if I can figure out how to use it on its own. From the tutorial snippets I'm figuring this can be demonstrated in about 20 lines of code, but I just don't know which ones, as the tutorials at http://learn.breezejs.com/ don't actually have enough walkthrough steps to replicate the Mongodb Node and HTML environment to support them, as far as I can see. I appreciate that Zza is complex, needs a training course to explain it properly, and has taken significant effort. However, that is rather the problem I experience as a potential adopter of BreezeJS technology. I accept that this is a 'wontfix' response :) I very much appreciate that you're working towards your own objectives and it's really my own problem if I can't unpack what's offered to serve my own purposes. Thanks for taking the time to get back to me.

[cefn]

@wardbell I'm guessing you mean there's a Zza test suite somewhere, perhaps https://github.com/Breeze/breeze.js.samples/tree/master/node/zza-node-mongo/client/test . But if it relies on the full Zza environment configuration, I may be as stuck as I was at the beginning knowing which things are necessary for a minimal app. I'd love to be able to replicate the tutorial implementations of http://learn.breezejs.com/ (e.g. the section labelled "Tutorial 1 - Queries w/Angular" as locally hosted implementations, (which is one thing which Zza makes eminently possible, with its github hosting and npm configuration - the reason I'm knocking on your doors :) With any working example with the simplicity of the Tutorial I'm probably good to go from there. Is there some reference I'm missing, which would tell me the missing parts not visible in the Breeze Live Tutorial which are actually needed to make that work. Sorry if this isn't your area.

[cefn]

For others researching this question, the Todo-Angular app, listed at http://www.breezejs.com/samples/ and with additional tutorial documentation at http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/528262/Data-with-Angular-js is promising, although its reliance on Entity Framework and database initialisation offered only through a Visual Studio project excludes its use in my Linux+Mongodb server environment, and really anything except desktop Windows, which is a disappointment for a Javascript-oriented codebase. Wondering if I can fill in the blanks for hosting and serving the data via Node+Mongodb by combining that example with the documentation at http://www.breezejs.com/documentation/mongodb but there's going to be a lot of guesswork and likely failure. Another way to describe this feature request might be - is there a simple Mongodb application example (like the Todo examples) which don't have a dependency on Visual Studio. Surprisingly there doesn't seem to be any. This is not intended as an appeal against 'wontfix' status though. I might link to this Issue thread and raise feedback against http://www.breezejs.com/samples/ Sorry for cluttering up the Zza Issue tracker. I'll try to rehome this issue somewhere else.