5 reasons why we are happy with AngularJS

I promised a general post about our experiences on sorted.jobs with AngularJS, so here's the view from ten thousand feet, rather than the 50 foot view of other posts.

1. Good for non-designers

In some ways this is more down to Bootstrap, but combine AngularJS, Bootstrap 3 and AngularUI you have a quick and easy way to produce a responsive and dynamic website.

2. Good for non programming web designers

Angular hides most of the Javascript so it makes for easy collaboration between a front end programmer and a designer. Angularjs directives mean that some of the clever bits can be presented to the designer as new HTML tags, which he can manipulate in the same way as other tags.

3. Very clear view seperation

Views live in templates, which are just HTML files, controllers  live in javascript controller files and never the twain shall meet. The actual controller function gets specified in an attribute to a <div> or other HTML tag -what could be easier (don't mention $scope)?

4. Decent documentation and community

The AngularJS site is pretty good, with a good tutorial, developer guide, and reference. Stackexchange is very active, Egghead.io is a good source of video tutorials although there are many others.  Manning has a couple of MEAP books; I have used AngularJS in Action, which is now nearly completed, the other is  AngularJS in Depth. Packt has a whole raft of AngularJS titles, I have used Mastering Web Application Development with AngularJS, I would guess the Manning books will be more up to date than the Packt one at the moment as they aren't formally published yet.

5. Testing tool.

Angular provides Protactor for end to end testing, this uses Selenium Webdriver to run Jasmine tests via standard web browsers. It is aware of Angular directives so you can run tests on Angular loops etc. It works well and the devlopers have been helpful when I found a problem.

That'll do for now, there's loads more and AngularJS has it's quirks, but I need coffee so that's another post.

Sorting and paging with AngularJS

We have two dashboard screens that make heavy use of AngularJS on sorted.jobs, one for candidates and one for recruiters. The recruiter screen in particular can end up with an awful lot of jobs on it, so the list needs to page, in addition it would be good to be able to sort by posting date, number of applicants, company name and so on.

Recruiter Dashboard

This is where we have got up to, not too happy about the UX/UI side, but it's workable. The paging is provided by the excellent AngularUI Booststrap library. Using it is pretty simple this is the AngularJS template directive ;

        <pagination total-items="active_jobs.total" ng-model="currentActivePage" ng-change="activePageChanged()"></pagination>

Pagination needs to know the size of the array it is paging over (active_jobs.total), has a variable to store the current page in (currentActivePage) and a function to call when you change the page - activePageChanged().

And here's the controller function :

  $scope.activePageChanged = function(i) {
    $scope.activePageStart = ($scope.currentActivePage -1) * $scope.itemsPerPage;
    $scope.activePageEnd = $scope.activePageStart + 10 ;
  }

As you can see all we are doing is changing the start end end points of the items we are viewing in the array; we have been a bit lazy and not passed itemsPerPage to the directive as we are using the default of ten.

The ng-repeat call looks like this :

      <div class='row' ng-repeat="job in active_jobs.hits.slice(activePageStart,activePageEnd)">

I did see pages offering a range filter but  array.slice() seems more direct.

In this example the whole array is passed from the backend to the front in one go (this is so it can be sorted in the browser), but you don't have to do it that way, other pages we have make a call to the back  end from within the activePageChanged() function  to get the next page of results.

Sorting

AngularJS provides the orderBy filter that will sort an array, the documentation is pretty good, the only real point to pick up is that to use it in our pagination example we need to call the controller version and not use the template filter version (this would only sort the array slice and not the whole array). So in the template we make a function call :

<p><a href="" ng-click="reverse=!reverse;active_order('_source.reference', reverse)">Reference<span class="glyphicon glyphicon-resize-vertical sort-col-header"></a></p>

We call the active order function with the column we want to sort by and the direction of sort. The  reverse=!reverse just twiddles the sort order.

We then need to set up the controller to use orderBy by injecting $filter :

function SomeCtrl ($scope, $location, $filter...

and using a bit of syntactic suger :

var orderBy = $filter('orderBy');

it is just a matter of defining the function :
           
  $scope.active_order = function(col, reverse) {
    $scope.active_jobs['hits'] = orderBy($scope.active_jobs['hits'], col, reverse);
  };        

and Robert is your father's brother.
 

Data Munging with MongoDB Aggregation and Python

I am evaluating some named entity recognition systems for sorted.jobs , trying to improve our search by sorting the wheat from the chaff, and some of the initial results look encouraging -but just how encouraging? We need to do a bit of analysis to find out.

The most hopeful results come from the extraction of programming language and operating system entities from the text -see the figure below :

Entity Types

On to MongoDB

This table was generated from a MongoDb database using two collections entities and missed_entities entities contains the terms that the program found and missed_entities the ones that I though it missed. Of the ones it found it either got it right ('Hit'), wrong ('Miss') or it was a bit dubious ('Null'). To get the stats I used the new (to me) MongoDB aggregation operations, analagous to the SQL GROUP BY, HAVING, SUM &c.

You could do all this in the old MongoDB map/reduce way, but aggregation seems a bit more intuitive.

So to get the 'Hit', 'Miss' and 'Null' columns the Python code looks like :

entity_c.aggregate([{"$group": {"_id": {"etype" : "$_type", "hit_miss" : "$hit_miss"} , "count": {"$sum": 1}}}])

which returns me rows like :

{u'count': 55, u'_id': {u'etype': u'ProgrammingLanguage'ProgrammingLanguage', u'hit_miss': u'1'}}

{u'count': 2, u'_id': {u'etype': u'ProgrammingLanguage'}}

and nothing for the misses because there weren't any.

The hard work occurs in the $group where I create a compound '_id' field made up of the entity type field and entity hit_miss field and then count all the matching entities.

The Aggregation Pipeline

But we can also look at the terms that the recogniser missed :

 

Missed entities

Here we only want the entities for the given type ('ProgrammingLanguage') and we want them in order, our PyMongo aggregate call now becomes :

missed_c.aggregate([
    {"$match" : {"_type" : etype}},
    {"$group": {"_id": "$name", "count": {"$sum": 1}}},
    {"$sort" : {"count" : -1}}
  ])

We have extra terms : '$match' which filters the documents so we only consider those with the passed in type (etype) and '$sort' which orders by the count we generated in the group. MongoDB pipelines these performing the match then the group and then the sort before returning you the result.

Finally, looking at the results we can see that there are some casing issues, we can make everything the same case by adding in a '$project' :

    { "$project" : { "name":{"$toUpper":"$name"} } },

$project creates a new field (or overwrites an existing one in the pipeline, not the real one in the collection) in this instance I have told it to make all the names uppercase and we get :

Normalised entities

It doesn't matter where in the array you place any of theses terms MongoDB will sort out the ordering.

What does this tell us? Well in this case if I could persuade the tagger to recognise CSS and variants of terms it already knows with a number on the end I would get a big jump in the overall quality of the results.

References

Angular Aggregation manual pages.

Retro Tech -letting out the inner anorack

Or what I did at the weekend. Time for a break from sorted.jobs, angularjs, elasticsearch and the rest, time to play with the HiFi. When I was a yoof, back in the Jurassic, we would obsess over getting the best sound from our LPs, spending ridiculous amounts of time (and money) over the biggest and most accurate soundscape. My daughter on the other hand now seems happy with playing stuff using her phone speaker, and that sounds worse than a 70s trannie, oops tranny.

Decca Kelly Ribbon Tweeters

So, back to the future, clearing out my lockup I disinterred my old Mordaunt Short 700 speakers. I bought these from a junk shop in the 80s as the tweeters were shot and I thought I could fix them. Not just any tweeters though, these were Decca Kelly Ribbon Tweeters, high end hen's teeth. Fortunately there is a nice man, called Howard Dawson who makes spares for these things, and indeed his own ribbon tweeters, a new pair of ribbons were fitted and we were off to the races.

Back then I thought they sounded excellent, there was only one drawback, they aren't small you could use them as coffins; like the man said 'there ain't no substitute for cubes'. So into the lockup they went, coming out for the odd outdoor party, and I ended up with a pair of KEF 104s good speakers, discreet (for HiFi speakers) better than any boombox going. But then the lockup had to be cleared, and we have a bigger house...

Gruesome Twosome

Time to see which ones I want to keep! The obvious thing to do was an old-style A/B test on the two of them, pick a few CDs play a track on one pair of speakers, switch over, play it on the other, see who wins. So  4 CDs  :

• Richard Thompson 'Rumour and Sigh'
• If you are in to Richard Thompson and are (or can appear to be) in the UK, you can hear him interviewed on BBC Mastertapes.
• Mozart 'Concerto for Flute and Harp K 299'
• Kevin Macleod 'Highland Strands'
• The Beautiful South 'Choke'

The idea was to get a mix of instrumental and vocal, acoustic and electronic , over a range of styles .

Who won?

The Mordaunt Shorts obviously, I wanted them to win :) To be fair I think they really did win, the bass on the KEFs are comparable to the MSs, surprising for such a small box -but then MS paired KEF units with Decca Horns in the later version.  But the treble on the 700s, driven by those tweeters, is just brilliant (although not too brilliant), you hear so much more; some fingerpicking I hadn't noticed on 'Rumour and Sigh', the girl on 'Choke' sounding like she's on fast forward, and the flute and the harp on Mozart and the acoustic instruments on Kevin's CD all sound that bit more real.

Anyone want a pair of Kef 104s? Nicer than many speakers you will find today, just not as good as something ten years older (which was probably in a much higher price bracket).