While I'm a Java hacker by day, JavaScript is the code I like to write. Its fun, its single thread is not a challenge its a enjoyable constraint that forces you to think a little as you code. Multi-threaded JavaScript would be like playing football but being allowed to use your hands.
This month I've been allowed by my pay masters to run with a couple of little projects written in nodejs. Not doing big scalable web sockets things, just quickly developing web apps that resolve specific problems, a REST API and GUI that's shared across a few peeps in the team.
Step up nodetoy...
Nodetoy is a little project I wrote a while back when node was only 0.5 versions old.Nodetoy provides
- A webserver for HTML and JS/CSS.
- Apache/ngix style Server Side Includes (SSI) for templating.
- A JSON/REST CRUD backend that saves flat files to the file system.
JSON layer is REST layer is so trivial its a joy to use.
- POST a blob of JSON to /data/foo.json to persist data.
- GET /data/foo.json to read data.
- DELETE /data/foo.json to delete data.
- GET /data/ returns a list of the json files.
Included in the download is and old version of jquery, you probably want to upgrade that, a little tester webpage so you can get started GETing and POSTing without having to write any JavaScript yet. And a little TODO app in case you need some boiler plate code to start with.
I like everything about this project.
It took no time to write, it was done as part of a series of introductions we did in the Riereta hacklab in Barcelona.
It does one thing and it does one thing well, a Linux mantra.
It makes use of the right patterns in the right places.
Features are nicely encapsulated, which is easy with node.
It has tools instead of docs.
I'm quite proud of the logo, it conveys the simplicity.
It has no build process, its source code is both ready to run and ready to be hacked.
Originally it had no dependencies other than node, because it was written back when there weren't many modules and before npm was included with node. Since then its been added to npm and various modules have been separated out for re-use. You can still clone the github repo to get up and running.
With nodetoy is very simple to quickly build webapps that are fun to write, starting with the HTML.
It has a very clear separation of front end and back end, and both are easily hackable. Because the back end is so limited your forced to keep it simple, which for RAD development soon pays off.
There is no code in the BE that is tied to the front end, its the antitheses of GWT. I write my FE code in jQuery but any ol AJAX API will do.
The older I get the more convinced I become of the fact that SSI is the only templating that is needed, if you want to manipulate the DOM do so in the browser.
One advantage of developing the BE in nodejs is that its implicitly "discoverable" since everything is delivered as code the application is the source code, there is no build process just hack away and it boots so fast that [ctrl+c] [up] [enter] is actually an acceptable way to work.
Of course being a grownup language with node you also have nunit testing, mocking, jshint for validating code code and a million and one bells and whistles that you would expect with a professional development environment and that you don't get if you do prototyping with CGI and bash. But despite all the features node remains fun and easy to code. You can bounce between working in unit tests on the CLI to running your web server for real literally in a second.
In the last project I knocked-up the JSON crud from nodetoy was sufficient to not need to make any BE changea. This enabled me to focus on doing dev purely in Firefox and notepad++. which brings me neatly to the next part of RAD development.
jQuery / Bootstrap...
If your a pro HTML designer I'm sure you'll cringe, bootstrap is used by 1% of the web these days its far from original but the fact is GUIs knocked up with bootstrap are very fast to write and always end up looking good. Arseing around with browser incompatibilities is not a fun part of development, I write HTML for Bottstrap in FireFox and it always worked in Chrome and Konqueor and the time I had to support IE8 for one of my GUIs it all just worked, thank you very much bootstrap.Bootstrap doesn't focus much on providing lots of features, it strikes me its a coders CSS tool. It tries to have as little impact on your HTML as possible and lets you focus on your content. The 960 grid system and responsive grid for me have proven easily enough options for layout control. Sticking to a tight grid format always helps to make pages look neat and tidy. Shame I didn't know about it when I wrote the test.html page.
Bootstrap does not require jQuery but it seems to be a natural pairing.
jQuery is a coder friendly toolkit too. While it has a ton of plugins its core focus is on helping you write code. Clearly no one wants to have to write another date picker, but its not the widgets that makes jQuery cool, its the code you end up writing. It is succinct. The selector logic is as good as your HTML naming conventions are. jQuery does nothing unexpected, it does exactly what you ask it to and no more, jQuery does a wonderful job of making my code cross platform, I have never had a problem with a bit of jQuery code not working where it should. You say "jump" jQuery says "yes sir".
Comparing to the good ol' lamp stack or tomcat + myslq I have to say that my nodetoy stack appeals to me more and more.
Pure HTML5 has to win over PHP the less code you write generating HTML the better, HTML should be almost static IMHO. Pulling request specific pre-generated HTML from server-side is soo 1999.
JavaScript everythwere, is a very convenient way to work. Mixing data types, formatting and conversions are annoyances to a coder. If you back end, front end, data store and data transfer format are all talking the same language you cut out a lot of crap from your code. Now you'll hear me rant about JSON and how much I dislike it in other blogs but when doing RAD web GUIs its clearly the best fit for the job.
Schema free Backends are much more convenient that relational databases. For prototyping the benefit is immediate, and no Hibernate does not really compare at all.
If I needed to scale up to DB for some reason a file system did not suffice for the job or the complete lack of locking or versioning becomes a worry I'd drop in CouchDB and keep the data in JSON. Going back to defining the data's detailed attributes before you write the code seems so backwards. With schema free development you want to add new attribute to your object you just
obj.newAtt = foo
and thats it. No DDL, no size limits no datatype considerations or data conversion considerations, if foo was a string well it stays a string and if it was boolean it stays a boolean and if it was undefined good job you didn't bother to create a column for it isn't it.
Bottom line is that I've been able to turn around little dynamic webapps in around 4 hours. KISS principal has been working for me of late.
No comments:
Post a Comment