Let’s build a cool application using the GitHub REST API. The GitHub API exposes RESTful services in order to fetch details for any software projects, also known as repositories, hosted there. All the data that is stored on the GitHub server can be accessible for developers through these APIs to implement their ideas or build applications atop.

 

Here is the preview of our app

Extending the dashboard

Note

GitHub (https://github.com) is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. In addition to it, developers can star/favorite projects they are interested in and collaborate with other developers by reporting bugs or sending patches (also known as pull requests) to improve them.

In this section, we are going to build a simple dashboard to watch over the development of the angularjs framework and the pace. We’ll consume two GitHub services to find the top 10 developers working on the top 100 open issues and the top 100 pull requests merged to get a glance at the developers’ productivity during the week.

In this example, we are going to use a different charting library named nvd3, which is based on d3.js. We’ll first install all the dependencies as follows:

bower install --save angular
bower install --save underscore
bower install --save d3
bower install --save nvd3
bower install --save angularjs-nvd3-directives

Note

D3.js (http://d3js.org/) is a JavaScript library used to manipulate HTML based on data with the help of HTML, SVG, and CSS. NVD3 (http://nvd3.org/) is a library of reusable chart components for d3.js. The angularjs-nvd3-directives project has ported nvd3.js charts to angularjs.