A lightweight exo-framework for ready-to-go NodeJs applications.
It's interesting how the idea of framework remains the same since 90's. Even with all the packages manager running, essentially most of them still use cannonballs to kill flies, bringing a lot of stuff we don't need, putting all together, demanding a big learning curve and re-inventing the wheel. Once said that...
"how do we create a framework unnecessarily heavy, semantically intuitive, which can overcome recurrent steps on building process applications, without being too imperative, focusing on fast and scalable development?"
We made Appt!
This document will introduce the main concepts used by Appt while the examples (yes, you'll see some code, but not here) will be separated according to their respective contexts with links to them at the Packages session below.
Imagine yourself starting a new project, which you don't really sure about the architecture. You'll write some code, import packages and classes by their paths when suddenly BOOM: you decide to reorganize everything. You're gonna rewrite every ../../../../path of every single file into your project.
...Or maybe, you're on a complex project, which becomes bigger and bigger fast, and the more it grows, the more impossible becomes to read and find yourself on it.
If some of those scenarios looks familiar and bother you, you should definitely use Appt!
To guarantee you're gonna use (and load) only what you want/need, Appt is fully modularized and uncoupled by scoped packages.
A simple cli for Appt projects seed generation (until now)
$ npm install -g @appt/cli
Read the docs: https://github.com/brab0/appt/tree/master/cli
The Appt's ecosystem package. It's responsible for give the DI approach.
$ npm install @appt/core --save
Read the docs: https://github.com/brab0/appt/tree/master/core
A ready-to-go wrapper to build amazing API's that gathers essential tools, such as express, body-parser and express-jwt, putting them all into Appt's ecosystem.
$ npm install @appt/api --save
Read the docs: https://github.com/brab0/appt/tree/master/api
A wrapper to put mongoose inside the Appt's ecosystem and make it works on crack!
$ npm install @appt/mongoose --save
Read the docs: https://github.com/brab0/appt/tree/master/plugins/mongoose
There was a first implementation of Appt concept. It's not maintained anymore, but it's stable and has this value on a non-class-orientation approach. If you feel curious about it, maybe it's worth to check it out.
$ npm install @appt/legacy --save
Read the docs: https://github.com/brab0/appt/tree/master/legacy
Thanks to ES6 features, Appt's core works like an exo-framework. Which means we can help your development process, being less intrusive.
Even removing @appt/core out of the way, your implementation's logic still makes sense and gonna work.
The whole Appt's ecosystem is based on dependecy injection pattern, using the power of decorators over the annotation sintaxe style (AtScript). This allows Appt's core to be more flexible and scale your application easier without being a lot imperative.
EVERYTHING on Appt's concept is about to build applications over the perception of Modules and Components. Inside @appt/core, these concepts are implemented as @ApptModule and @ApptComponent decorators, which have the purpose to assemble the whole application and handle the implementation's logic, respectively. That means, you can naturally build your application as you always do (building your custom middlewares, server, database connections and so on...) and let Appt to wrap it all with simplicity on a non-intrusive style.
Even the main core decorators @ApptModule and @ApptComponent have particular and simple roles, Appt also provides a way to add some powers and behaviours to them, making use of Special-Type Extenders. That means, even you do not need them, they can give an elegant, semantic and straightforward approach to your server implementation, database connection, routes etc.
Because we are also talking about to create ready-to-go NodeJs applications, every Special-Type Extender has its default configuration. That means Appt can overcome some trivial steps on development process, such as writing CORS, defining Body Parsers, making JWT middlewares, configuring Routers etc, by simply providing built-in default configuration and, of course, letting you overwrite them.
Plugins are, essentially, uncoupled wrappers developed to work with third party packages to work specifically into the Appt's ecosystem. Although you might not need them, you will notice they can decrease your development effort an give you an elegant approach.
Because Appt use ES6 features, your project must predict that and make use of some compiler tool, such as babel, and configure it to work with decorators as annotation (babel-plugin-transform-decorators-legacy). For TypeScript development, decorators are available as an experimental feature (use experimentalDecorators as true on your tsconfig.json).
If you have any suggestion or want to contribute somehow, let me know!
MIT License
Copyright (c) 2017 Rodrigo Brabo
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