AngularJS: Creating Objects that map to REST Resources (ORM-Style)

After lots of research, here is a comprehensive list of all the solutions available:

• Restmod

• Modelizer

• ModelCore

• angular-watch-resource

• angular-restful

• ngResource

• angularjs-rails-resource

• angular-nested-resource

• Aar.js

• Angular Activerecord

• Angular-Data

• ngActiveResource

• restangular

• BreezeJS

• ng-backbone

but honestly I wasn't very happy, so I decided to add to the list my own solution haha. Check it out here: $modelFactory.

Your end-result code ends up looking something like:

var module = angular.module('services.zoo', ['modelFactory']);

module.factory('AnimalModel', function($modelFactory){
  return $modelFactory('api/zoo');
});

return module;

I believe this is a better solution over the rest because mainly the model definition closely resembles Angular's ngResource, adding just low-level features one needs that it lacks. Its super lightweight (1.45k gzip/min) and has only a few small dependencies ( no lodash, jquery, etc ).

For simple interaction you can use Angular-Resource (http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ngResource.$resource) which can be quite handy for simple REST interaction (to download it go to http://code.angularjs.org/1.0.6/)

Sadly you only get limited control when using angular resource, and for anything more advanced you will need to create your own services based on Angularjs $http service - http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.$http.

Hope that helps.

JSData
A project which started as angular-data is now "a framework-agnostic data store built for ease of use and peace of mind." It is has excellent documentation and has support for relations, multiple backends (http, localStorage, firebase), validation and of course angular integration.
http://www.js-data.io/

BreezeJS
The AngularJS YouTube channel features this video using BreezeJS

Which is an advanced ORM which even supports client-side filtering and other cool stuff. It best suited for backend that support OData, but can be made to work on other types of backends.

ngResource
Another option is to use the ngResource, here is an example on how to extend it with your own functions:

module.factory('Task', function ($resource) {
    var Task = $resource(WEBROOT + 'api/tasks/:id', {id: '@id'}, {update: { method: 'PUT'}});
    angular.extend(Task.prototype, {

        anExampleMethod: function () {
            return 4;
        },

        /**
         * Backbone-style save() that inserts or updated the record based on the presence of an id.
         */
        save: function (values) {
            if (values) {
                angular.extend(this, values);
            }
            if (this.id) {
                return this.$update();
            }
            return this.$save();
        }
    });
    return Task;
});

I found ngResource to be very limited, even compared to Backbone.Model which has:

• Custom JSON parsing via Model.parse
• Possible to extend a BaseModel (No the baseUrl in ngResource)
• Other hooks like Backbone.sync, which enables LocalStorage, etc.

Restangular
"AngularJS service to handle Rest API Restful Resources properly and easily"
https://github.com/mgonto/restangular

Or try some of the other ORM's
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6786307/which-javascript-orm-to-use

I'm creator of Restangular so my opinion can be biased.

But as Bob said, you can use Restangular for it.

Restangular uses your Restful API Resources to go over the tree. You can also add new methods to this.

This is coding example: https://github.com/mgonto/restangular#lets-code

And this way you can add new methods to your object (The bonus points :)) https://github.com/mgonto/restangular#creating-new-restangular-methods

Hope this works out for you :).

Otherwise, you can also use ngResource ($resource) for this but in my opinion, it needs some "love" and "sugar".

Bests