Warning: Ufront is not actively maintained now (as at Mar 2018). I highly recommend you to use tink_web instead
This is a collection of guides for the NodeJS target of Ufront (website, repo).
From Ufront repo:
Ufront is a client/server MVC web framework for Haxe. It allows you to share models, views and controllers between both server-side and client-side code. Client side, your app will run as a fast single-page-app. But everything can still work server-side - which makes for fast first page loads, great SEO, and a good fallback for old browsers.
Actually, Ufront does support the neko and php target (and they work very well). But according to my practical experience, the amount of libraries of nodejs (from npm) is much much more than what you can find for neko or php. That makes development much easier and faster. (p.s. for neko, you are basically limited to only use Haxe libraries). So, let's focus on NodeJS!
Since Ufront does support neko and php, so the guides here should also apply to these two targets, with slight modification. The main difference is the entry point.
In nodejs, we call listen(port) to start the server, and in neko/php we call executeRequest().
So, by changing this call you should be able to compile most of the examples in this guide.
The minimal folder contains a set of minimal examples.
The scopes of these minimal examples are very confined, so readers can easily
identify the minimum code required for a certain feature.
The integrated folder contains a set of more-real-world examples that integrates
several features. These examples are usually more complex and maybe a little bit
harder to understand, make sure you have gone through the minimal examples first,
to gain a brief understanding of the individual features.
Please feel free to open issues/PR for:
- Example request
- Bug report / bug fixes
- Any other general feedback / questions
Or you can join our chatroom: https://gitter.im/ufront/ufront
The following are the steps to build and run the examples.
Install the required libraries.
haxelib git ufront-mvc https://github.com/ufront/ufront-mvc
haxelib install express
haxelib install hxnodejs
haxelib install pushstate
- You need to install NodeJS on your machine, please refer to the official NodeJS guide (website).
- Install the "nodemon" package,
npm install -g nodemon.
Navigate to each example folder, then build the hxml files there, for example:
cd minimal/01_static_results
haxe server.hxml
If there is a client, compile it as well:
haxe client.hxml
By default: Ufront requires the following node packages:
- compression
- body-parser
- cookie-parser
- express
- multer
The dependencies have been specified in the package.json file in each examples, so simply navigate to the bin folder, install the node dependencies by npm install.
cd bin
npm install
Then start the server:
npm start
Open your browser and navigate to localhost:2987