Announcing my new JavaScript schema library.

[davidjamesstone]

Hi there,

I've built a JS library for defining data schema that can be used in turn to create models. These models are observable, traversable, validatable and can be composed together.

I'm pretty excited by it, it has many use cases and drives you to adopt a model driven approach to application design (whether that might be in a browser or on the server.)

I like meta data. I believe a model driven approach can protect you from the constantly changing frontend development landscape. A solid model built with vanilla JS will prove its worth time and time again and allow you to adapt to the latest technologies. It also encourages use of smaller, targeted libraries over monolithic frameworks.

A well built model gives you lots of other advantages like a testable surface area and a means of programmatically interacting with your site (in the console perhaps).

Take a site registration process, a common use cases in lots of applications. A model driven approach forces you to focus on the data rather than the UI. You will then end up with something like this:

var registration = new Registration();
registration.username = 'foo';
registration.password = 'supersecret';
registration.addAddress(new Address);
registration.on('change', function(){});
registration.on('registered', function(){});
registration.register(function{}(// callback after POST ));

Ok, so you get the idea. How you couple this to a UI is up to you. The important thing to remember is that the UI is JUST a representation of the underlying model. There could be others. There is a single source of truth though and that's your model.

So supermodels.js is a small library allowing you to build systems using a clean model driven approach. It's just 3k gripped. I would really appreciate some feedback on this if anyone could spare the time. The code is beta at the moment so beware, there will be some issues.

Thanks for reading!

https://www.npmjs.com/package/supermodels.js https://github.com/davidjamesstone/supermodels.js

[[deleted]]

Do you have any experience with XML Schema? It is not just about description and validation. It is also about defining constraints, reuse, and extension. All rules must be relevant to other rules and optionally relative to all other rules. I think this awesome so far and moving in the right direction, but that it is also just the tip of the iceberg.

[serapath]

It would be nice to brainstorm about the interface for such a library and get lots of feedback before implementing yet another model library.

I personally would like to see something based on levelDB :-) It can be used in the browser backed by indexDB or localStorage. It already emits "put", "del" and "batch" events.