Back of an Envelope Node.js Framework - Discuss

I had a quiet afternoon today and while "keeping up with recent developments in my field" or as you might call it "wasting my afternoon googling" I got to thinking what I'd like a Node.js MVC framework should or could contain.

How design shouldn't be done

Firstly, I've been playing with Node.js for about three weeks now and I'm impressed, but I can't seem to find a framework that I'm happy with. Backbone looked good, but I wasted three days on it and it was too much like hard work. Similarly Spine which tried to be less complicated, but eventually failed. Finally I really wanted Brunch to work but it was a release behind backbone (which is a major component of it) and I didn't want to get lost in the mismatching documentation (the Backbone release was pretty major).

I have spent a whole lot of time over the last couple of years using python frameworks, especially Flask and I like their approach of starting with a good foundation (in their case Werkzeug) and adding the bits that are still needed. Could that work with Node? I mean writing a basic HTTP server looks pretty straight forward and there are tons of modules to add the other functionality.

So with this possibly naive starting position I grabbed my pen and scribble down some stuff I thought I'd need. Now bear in mind that I haven't much used any of these modules yet, and I pinched several of them from the bits that go to make up Brunch.


I'd appreciate any feedback, suggestions and so on that those more learned than I might care to offer. Few of you will be less learned I imagine.


Here are the transcribed notes with some links:

Server

• Simple Node.js
• Express

Routing

• choose a module
• Express?

Data Store

• Mongo?
• CouchDB?
• Barricane-db

Models

• JS Object/JSON?
• ORM?

Views
    -CSS

• lesscss ?
• Stylus ?

    -Templating

• mustache(js) ?
• Eco (coffeescript)

Controllers

• Plain Old JS
• CoffeeScript?
• jQuery
• Underscore.js
• Quip (responses) ?

Middleware

• how? Express

Other Stuff

• node-boilerplate?
• Stitch (glue)
• Cake

If you spot any typos, inaccuracies or just plain lies then please let me know.

Set Up Your Own Git Repository Hosting Service in Three Minutes

You might have seen my earlier post "A Review of Free Code Repositories".

Well I forgot about hosting your own. Really handy for hobbyist development. I have one of those free developer servers from Amazon out there somewhere. I don't use it much except to demo the occasional site and so on.

I decided that it was a good idea to set it up as a git repository and i show you here how to do this. If you are using something Ubuntu-ish remotely then this should take about three minutes.

A Word of Explanation
This is the simple setup, it avoids creating 'git' user on the remote server, but you DO need to use a seperate key for using the git service and I show you that first.

On your local machine:

# echo "Host gitserver
  Hostname ec2-XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com
  User git-col
  PreferredAuthentications publickey
  IdentityFile ~/keys/git-col.pub
" >> ~/.ssh/config

# mkdir ~/keys

# ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/col/.ssh/id_rsa): git-col.pub # do NOT accept the default

# cp git-col* ~/keys
# scp git-col.pub ec2-XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com:
# ssh 
ec2-XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com

On your remote host you are now logged in as 'ubuntu':

# sudo apt-get install git
# git clone git://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite
# ./gitolite/src/gl-system-install 
# gl-setup -q ~/git-col.pub 
# exit

On your local machine:

# git config --global user.name "Your Name"
# git config --global user.email your@email.address
# git clone gitserver:gitolite-admin
# exit

That's it really. To create a new repository called dummy and initialize it, you can do something like this.

On your local machine:

# set the new repository name
export repo=dummy

# update the gitolite conf file with your new repository
cd ~/gitolite-admin
echo "        repo    ${repo}" >> conf/gitolite.conf
echo "                RW+     =   @all" >> conf/gitolite.conf

# push the config to your server
git commit -m "added new repository ${repo}" conf/gitolite.conf
git push 

# make sure you cd to an existing directory!
mkdir ~/Projects
cd ~/Projects

# pull back the new empty repository
git clone gitserver:${repo}

# go to repository and make any change
cd ${repo}
echo "*.pyc" >> .git/info/exclude # I use python
touch README

# do your first push back to master
git add .
git commit -am "repository ${repo} pushed to origin on gitserver"
git push origin master

You'll be using that last code section again, so you might want to make it into a script.

Never type anything you don't understand. 

If I've made any mistakes then please let me know.

CoffeeScript Development in 3 mintutes

Any obvious reference to coffee needs a picture

The idea of CoffeeScript just sounds great me. I like the idea of compiling decent JavaScript from code you can actually read. But what do you do if you have no Node.js available to compile it?

Well the answer is to compile to JS at runtime. However, I had an awful time getting the right setup to get going. If you are interested in playing with CoffeeScript where Node.js is not available (I'm using it in work to show what it's capable of) then just follow these instructions.

Create a directory to work in and inside that create an index.html file thus:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>CoffeeScript Demo</title>
    <script data-main="scripts/requirements" 
               src="scripts/require.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>CoffeeScript Demo</h1>
</body>
</html>

and a directory called 'scripts' into which you put the following.

• JQuery
• Require
• CoffeeScript Plugin For Require
• A file called requirements.js containing:

require([
    'scripts/jquery-1.6.1.min.js',
    'cs', 
    'cs!app',
]);

• And a file called app.coffee containing:

square = (x) -> x * x
alert square 42

That's it!

Now load the index.html page into your browser and the CoffeeScript code app.coffee should execute.

Of course you will now have to go away and read the docs so that you know why that worked, but then so will I.