Time to add another weekly to the mix. At my office I generally work from home on Fridays because it was a tradition before me and who am I to break a tradition? At my last job it was Thursdays, but it’s awesome that most eng jobs understand and allow for the space to get shit done with out distractions.
As part of my Fridays from now on, I’d like to carve a bit out of my day and just go down a rabbit hole. Most of them will be tech related (most of which will be frontend) but I’m not going to put a label on this segment other than the fact that it will probably not be quite as detailed (all though I say that now and then this one turned out to be a monster). Some weeks it might even be me just throwing up some links and commenting.
So lets start easy this week by opening the Pandora’s box that is Node.js. In my scant spare time I’m working on a side project that is essentially just an API with some munging of data. HOWEVER, I’ve grown bored with my standard Node/Express workflow and wonder if there’s anything newer or more exciting to play with. Lets find out together shall we?
So I’ve heard of some other alternatives, but haven’t really dove into Node stacks in a while because I’ve been a Python girl up until recently. So, let’s be lame and google alternatives to express.js (what, you were expecting high-tech sleuthing?). Immediately the apparent new darling Koa is all up in my grill. So Koa is all ES6 ES2015 – whatever I’m sticking with ES6, it’s not like we’re all going to magically start using ES2015 in 2015 anyway. The initial footprint is small, but you can’t do much with it without additional middleware.
Koa has always been something that I’ve kinda prodded at with a stick and never done much with. Each time I read about it I find it more and more interesting, but it seems like it would be overly complex for my small personal stuff. Besides being ES6 opinionated, you’re basically free to add whatever you want. You can use established middleware or roll your own without too much effort. For my small side project though, I just don’t have the energy to research yet another step of deciding which middleware to use or creating it all from scratch.
And then there’s the other standard in a trifecta of frameworks that everyone talks about called Hapi. I have never gone beyond looking at the Hapi documentation and going “nope!” but that’s just a personal opinion because I just don’t like the look of using objects everywhere for everything. It gives me Backbone flashbacks and I just can’t handle it. So I don’t have much to say about Hapi, but will take this to an aside that I enjoy how much like art coding is. I can have feelings about the tools I use. It may be amazing for someone else, but if I’m just not feeling it, I generally have other options.
So lets narrow it down, what I really want is an API layer. I don’t care as much about rendering pages. So lets keep going. A couple of new contenders – Restify and Loopback. Both seem decent, but I’m a sucker for not having to do as much work and we use Ruby at my new job so I love it when I don’t have to define all of my routes by hand. Loopback is also a part of something called StrongLoop, which I’ll admit I haven’t heard of before but seems to have some Node enterprise and monitoring apps. Oh… and it’s built atop Express. We have come full circle my old friend.
Alright, lets walk through the tutorial. I have mixed feelings about generators since they usually throw waaaaaay more at me than I will ever need, but FOR SCIENCE!
How Cute
I told you it was for science. Alright, so before I create any models, I decided to poke around at the code generated. And I am immediately vaguely displeased. It includes a .editorconfig file, which while in sync with the configuration settings I generally use seems annoying to impose on someone. Also it generated a looooot of files. They seem orderly though, so lets press on.
And now I’m lost. This is not in the tutorial. -1 for out of date tutorial! Time to break out the docs!
In general, use
PersistedModelas the base model when you want to store your data in a database using a connector such as MySQL or MongoDB. UseModelas the base for models that don’t have CRUD semantics, for example, using connectors such as SOAP and REST.
+5 for helpful docs. The other models are actually pretty cool too and I could see myself using them quite a bit in larger applications, but for now lets stick with PersistedModel.
And there you have it! I now have a person model! It’s some pretty json that’s easy to read and understand. So in summary: Loopback/StrongLoop reminds me immensely of Rails, which I’m OK with. I think I will continue to play with it, but so far it gets a thumbs up from me.
As an aside: For those wondering, I’m using the Peppermint theme with a basic bash terminal, though I do recommend zsh/ohmyzsh and use that at work. I also use Sublime Text with the theme & color scheme itg.flat – Dark.