Promises, promises...

That's all we seem to be hearing at the moment, dealing with Javascript's asynchronous nature.  Using a promise means that the app doesn't have to wait for requests to come from the server before running the rest of its code.  If there's a delay in the information we're looking for being sent back from the server this can result in the app hanging if we didn't have a promise to let the rest of the code run.  So what does the promise do?  It effectively says that when the information comes back it promises to do what you wanted with it (ie populate some data) or send up an error if there's a problem retrieving it.

Okay, I hear you thinking, but what if you want that data to load up on the initial screen the user sees?  Are they going to be looking at a blank screen while the server and client are having their chat?  No! This is where Vue's mounted hook comes in - you write your promise in there and everything appears when the DOM (document object model - it's a programming interface for HTML documents which can be modified with JavaScript) is loaded.

The Backend

This week we get to use databases again.  Not a relational database (we used PostgreSQL during our Python module). Now we are looking at NoSQL databases, MongoDB in particular.  There are different types of NoSQL databases, MongoDB - named as mongo is a shortened version of Humongous - pairs each key with a data structure known as a document. 

Progress

The way you progress through Codeclan's course is really very clever, it's amazing how quickly you get to grips with new languages and frameworks without really thinking about it. We're now using Javascript as opposed to Python, Express as opposed to Flask, MongoDB as opposed to PostgreSQL, Node as opposed to Pip.  Once you know how to use one server/database/package manager it feels so much more comfortable to learn a new one.

Vue

I'm not going to lie, I didn't feel immediately comfortable with Vue!  However as the week has progressed, things have started to slot into place.  I'm still not 100% in love with Vue but the instructors are all telling me that everything will fall into place in Project week...so I'm going to "Trust the Process"!!

Project Week

I know - how quickly are we flying through this course?!  Second project already!  I am really interested to see how this goes, this time round it's a group project. Will we work well as a team? What strengths and weaknesses will we have?  Will our skills compliment each other and bring the best out of each other?  I hope so!  We've been given inputs on how to work together in an Agile way and how to plan and manage ourselves.  We are also learning the next part of GitHub, how to make a develop branch off our main branch and then make feature branches to work in off of the develop branch.  Most importantly of all - how to merge our working feature branch back into develop and sort out any conflicts there may be! Lets hope it all works as it should in Project week!

Back to the family stuff now...