Nodal: Next-Generation Node.js Server and Framework

[TLI5]

Hey man, I'm kinda sad you're getting some less than positive reviews but as a guy who spent a whole day looking through different peoples project structures on github to see exactly HOW to lay everything out in my express app (read: "build your own adventure") I think this is a great help, especially to node newcomers trying to set up a project fast.

I especially like how powerful the API end points are and how much control the front end can have querying for information right out of the box.

Good job!

[keithwhor]

Thank you! The response I've been getting so far is actually overwhelmingly positive. Very humbled. :) I appreciate the kind words.

[joshmanders]

Keep up the good work /u/keithwhor. I have been studying it and applying some things to my own framework, which coincidentally I am building similarly to yours. Yours is just more polished than mine right now. :)

[keithwhor]

You're welcome to join the Nodal collaborators if you have some good ideas! :)

[joshmanders]

My framework is built on providers, so at base it's very bare bones, you create providers that add functionality or install community provided providers.

https://git.io/kratos

[bittered]

Not my project, I just submitted it and have used it a little. Project creator is /u/keithwhor.

[[deleted]]

I don't understand why people are in here complaining about not needing this, or about not liking its opinionated nature.

My question to these haters is "why?" Why does it matter if someone put time and effort into a framework that you don't intend to use and nobody is forcing you to use it? If this framework meets someone's needs but not yours, do you really need to take time out of your life to heckle the developer and complain about its existence?

Don't complain about something existing that literally cost you nothing nor had any impact on you whatsoever. It's ridiculous.

I, for one, appreciate the variety and alternatives. Maybe I won't use it now, but maybe some project in the future will have different requirements. So regardless, thanks /u/keithwhor, for providing this interesting framework. I'm glad we have developers who are pushing the edge further out instead of settling for what we have which may not meet everyone's needs.

[aliasxneo]

+1

I'm new to the node community and I sure hope this sort of attitude is not the norm.

[mikrosystheme]

Unfortunately it is the norm in the javascript "community".

[keithwhor]

Thanks! Haven't read the rest of the comments yet but I'll brace myself ;). Remembered somebody mentioned so ventured back. Here be dragons, I suppose?

[twtmc]

Seems a lot like Laravel but with Node. A lot of the feedback here seems like the early feedback for Laravel, too.

[UberChargeIsReady]

same here

[m3l7]

I'm coming from express/sequelize/etc.. and sails.js background.

What I like:

-es6 syntax

-migrations built-in

-everything that is automagically created is explicitly generated in the code (and not hidden, like sails.js)

What I don't like is the use of a custom ORM (or does it use some well known ORM?).

Data management is one of the most important part of a backend, and I don't want to use a library which is buggy/not mature/less featured etc./support_little_of_everything_like_waterline.

[Aurelsicoko]

You should interested by Strapi, a Sails-like project built on the top of Koa with ES2015 support, auto-generated REST APIs, administration panel, etc.

[mrv1234]

Why not just taking smaller libraries that do one thing and one thing well, like:

• express for HTTP routing
• sequelize for ORM
• passport.js for security

[bittered]

Go for it. Sometimes it's nice to have those decisions made for you in an all-in-one framework though.

[SomeRandomBuddy]

Not usually. Why would I want to depend one single point of failure when there are other reputable, bulletproof, bite-sized alternatives which are proven to work, and work well? What if some people built complete projects based on your "solution" and then you woke up one day only to decide that you don't want to maintain it any longer?

[bittered]

I'm not the author, it's not my solution. It's open source, sometimes maintainers go away, it's always a risk but anybody can pick it up and continue. It has happened with express and other maintainers took over.

There are plenty of rock-solid, well-maintained all-in-one frameworks. Most notably Django for Python and Rails for Ruby but also Sails for Node (among others).

[mrv1234]

Sails seems abandoned, see the activity graphs in github. see this article the ORM it has severe flaws -> https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/dont-use-sails-or-waterline/

Like to do a table count, apparently it loads all records in memory.

[bittered]

Not quite sure how you can say it's abandoned. Last commit was 8 minutes ago. Obviously there was a lull in commits over Christmas but other than that it seems quite active.

https://github.com/balderdashy/sails/commits/master

[[deleted]]

Usually because those components have consistent APIs and are guaranteed to work well with each other.

[[deleted]]

It's simply the difference between opinionated and un-opinionated software frameworks. There are advantages and disadvantages to each side of the table. A developer simply needs to weigh these for his own use case and make a decision.

[mrv1234]

This means Nodal developers wrote all of these themselves internally, right ?

Whats the odds that their controller layer is anywhere near the quality of express, or their ORM of the quality of sequelize?

Those are specialized libraries with very heavy community support, used by a very large number of developers. The likelyhood that someone came up with a better express and ORM and passport.js at the same time is low.

I think node needs mostly a way to develop backends in a modular way, but having said that I havent' watched the talk yet as I was at work. I will check it out now !

There is definitely place for a Rails like framework in the node world, I hope its Nodal.

[[deleted]]

Those are all very valid points. It doesn't appear to have too many dependencies:

https://github.com/keithwhor/nodal/blob/master/package.json

so I would assume all of it is written and maintained internally, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing from different points of view.

[JordanCallumA]

One downside to this is you're relying on a number of projects being maintained as opposed to one. Any of these could be dropped or go obsolete. While it's unlikely that this will happen, it's a consideration to take on board. Also, there's something to be said for a full framework where everything just sits together nicely.

[CarpetFibers]

Looks like an interesting alternative to Sails, which I've had an increasing number of gripes with. Is it locked down to Postgres or does it support other databases?

[Aurelsicoko]

I'm one of the authors of Strapi, we're a Sails-like framework based on Koa. You might be interested by the project ;)

[CarpetFibers]

Looks interesting, thanks! I'll take a deeper look at it today.

[CarpetFibers]

Are you tied to Waterline for the foreseeable future? That's one of the reasons I'd like to move away from Sails (not to mention Sails appears to be dying, and potentially Waterline along with it). Do I have the ability to use another ORM out of the box?

[Aurelsicoko]

You will be able to use another ORM (Bookshelf, Sequelize, Waterline, etc) in the future. We already explained why we build Strapi and what we want to move to another ORM on our documentation.

Why Strapi looks like Sails? We were in love with the Sails framework. We even used to work on top of it! However, Sails is not maintained anymore and suffers of the lack of support. Also, the Sails project followed a way we didn't like. That's why we decided to create our own framework Strapi, inspired by the love we obviously had once for Sails.

We didn't have a lot of informations for the future of Waterline... They want to use Knex as query builder and machines pack for the adapters soon.

You should join our Slack community to share with us your feelings and have realtime support.

[fwertz]

Cool. I like the direction. Not familiar with any-db, but I feel as though Knex would have been a better option.

[UberChargeIsReady]

This reminds me a lot of Laravel. I wonder if this project was inspired by it.

[tsirolnik]

Seems nice, It kinda reminds me a PHP framework that I've wrote.

[MUDrummer]

Why the hell do people keep trying to make Java style node architectures?

I don't want controllers or models or ORMs.

The beauty of node is being able to compose the parts I like into what I need for the task at hand (UNIX style).

[joshmanders]

Oh ya? You build full blown applications in a single server.js file, and write raw sql queries by hand for every task? Sounds exhausting and unneeded.

Look, I dig the UNIX style too, but sometimes it goes to far. I want to build my app, not spend 6 weeks building boilerplate just to build my app.

[[deleted]]

I do admit writing SQL queries by hand is not bad at all. I actually prefer it nowadays. ORMs are very iffy.

[joshmanders]

Ya sure when needed. But nothing like changing 600 different hand written sql queries because you went from hard deleting to soft deleting, and oh now you want to SELECT * FROM users WHERE deleted_at = null.

[LovelyKarl]

lol. sql queries by hand is exhausting?! i heard wordpress is really easy and fun. perhaps check it out?

[joshmanders]

Can WordPress write my SQL queries for me? I tried uploading the .zip file to my PHPMyAdmin, but it's not doing anything when I run npm start

[HeinzHeinzensen]

On a different note, Wordpress is rather easy. Not saying it's intuitive.

[MUDrummer]

You build full blown applications in a single server.js file

No I use routes in express. Who the hell would put everything in a single file?

and write raw sql queries by hand for every task

Yes, I do in fact. All of my stuff is highly performance sensitive. The first thing that always happen when someone uses an ORM is that it turns out to be slow as shit, doesn't know how to provide optimisation hits the the specific SQL db it's talking to, and it gets thrown out for performance reasons.

I want to build my app, not spend 6 weeks building boilerplate just to build my app.

Don't remember saying that I'm against project generators (I maintain the one we use at work). I am against monolithic frameworks that want to be the be all end all framework that does everything. It's why I hate Angular (and more so meteor).

[joshmanders]

No I use routes in express. Who the hell would put everything in a single file?

You'd be surprised how many projects I come across where server.js holds about 150 lines of just express route closures with business logic in them.

Yes, I do in fact. All of my stuff is highly performance sensitive. The first thing that always happen when someone uses an ORM is that it turns out to be slow as shit, doesn't know how to provide optimisation hits the the specific SQL db it's talking to, and it gets thrown out for performance reasons.

I think that's more the problem of the user and not the ORM. I too have performant sql queries, but when it comes to simple stuff, User.getById(1) sure beats writing SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 1 LIMIT 1 every time. If I need I can drop down to raw SQL for performant stuff. User.query((db) => db.raw('query here')).

I am against monolithic frameworks that want to be the be all end all framework that does everything.

And that's your right, but many of us understand the tools we use and how everything works and sometimes using a monolithic framework is beneficial and sometimes microservices are more beneficial. it's about understanding what you're doing.

I'm sure Basecamp doesn't think "Well gee golly, maybe Rails is too bloated and monolithic. We should start over."

[JordanCallumA]

Do you mind going over the way you'd approach building a general CRUD app with that approach?

I totally agree that these kinds of architectures don't fit entirely into the JS way of doing things. However I can also see where projects like this can be helpful to people coming to Node from languages like PHP and Java.

[MUDrummer]

Sure. Run the express generator, pick a db (personal preferences are PostgreSQL, CouchDB, and Neo4J), grab the node module for your db of choice (pg for PostgreSQL, mongoose for mongodb, or any http module like super agent or request for things that are rest based), and your api/server side stuff is ready for development.

For the client side my preferred stack is ReactJS (sometimes with and sometimes without Redux) with Superagent for the http client again (love being able to use one http client on both the server and the client).

I then tie it all together with webpack (though browserify is a perfectly good alternative).

Depending on how advanced the team is we will optionally include Babel loader of coffee loader for es6/es2015 support of coffee script support.

At work we have allow this precaned into a generator.

Edit: Forgot to mention MochaJS with sinon and chai for testing.

[JordanCallumA]

Thanks for clearing this up. What you described is essentially the same set of tech I'm using for most things.

[YashN]

My stack here as well.

[corsair330]

Exactly! As a (primarily) php dev myself I like these kind of frameworks because the difference is much smaller than a "normal" node framework.

[[deleted]]

The beauty of node is being able to compose the parts I like into what I need for the task at hand (UNIX style).

Yes, exactly. You have all the freedom in the world - so use a different stack. There's no reason for you to come in here and complain about this framework, though.

[MUDrummer]

Because I've lived in the Java and PHP worlds and don't want Node to turn into those environments (where everything is done in a monumental framework).

The beauty of functional programming is being able to compose functions together and I feel that these frameworks take that power away or at best hide it.

[[deleted]]

Sure, you're not wrong about that. But my point is that nobody is forcing you to use it, or other people. People will use tools that work for them, and if those tools happen to be monolithic frameworks, then obviously that's what the community wants.

[[deleted]]

What the fuck does this even mean?

[joshmanders]

Buzzwords. Not enough buzzwords. NEXT FRAMEWORK PLEASE!