This is a simple, me screwing around on a Friday kinda project. The goal is to write a simple piece of forum software, initially, then add some funky features like automatically updating threads and other fancy real-time features.

The application is built using Node.js on the back-end, using MongoDB as a storage engine. The software will initially be built as a simple RESTful webservice, in which the templates are rendered on the clientside (currently using Sammy.js - read my blogpost about Sammy on Xebia NeXt. This should ensure a simple and fast back-end.

Features

I've set up a simple listing on Google Moderator, please go here to suggest and vote for new features to be added.

Requirements

You'll need to have Node.js, Node Package Manager (NPM) and MongoDB installed. Look 'em up on Google. Also, it's best to do this all on Linux - I'm doing all this in a Virtualbox install of Ubuntu.

Getting started

First, install MongoDB. Best bet is to go to the MongoDB quickstart and install it according to your system. Don't forget to create a data directory - and I'd stick with the default, makes things easier for you. Add Mongo's bin directory to your PATH and run Mongod (MongoDB Daemon) as a daemon service. I run it in a separate terminal window and leave it like that. In a second terminal window, test if it works using the mongo commandline utility.

mongo
>db.foo.save({yo: 1337});
>db.foo.find();
>exit

Next, have NPM download and setup the third-party dependencies:

npm install -d

Run the unit tests with:

NODE_ENV='test' node runTests.js

Run the integration tests with:

NODE_ENV='test' vows test/API/*

Finally, start the server:

node app.js

A message should appear that the server runs on localhost:3000 (along with a listing of the settings). Visit http://localhost:3000 and witness the glory.

To run in production mode (with caching enabled), run:

NODE_ENV=production node app.js