express-resource-architect

Kickstart applications with resources

This currently is in heavy development. It might quickly change. You should probably not use it before 1.0.0.

Idea

As we're developing many applications in a restful manner with express and mongoose, I saw a lot of code being duplicated over and over again. We've got many use-cases where a resource should be manageable using a nice interface. In 80 percent of all cases, this consists of the typical MVC views:

• new
• create
• edit
• update

We solve this by splitting such a resource in 2 parts. One is the route registration, the second is the controller which is representated using the route-handler an express app receives.

Example:

Route registration

express = require('express')
 
controllers = require('./controllers/users')
 
app = express()
 
app.get '/users/new', controllers.new

Controller (controllers/users.coffee)

mongoose = require('mongoose')
 
User = mongoose.model('User')
 
exports.new = (req, res, done) ->
  user = new User()
  res.render 'users/new', user: user

Controllers of those simple cases are needed over and over again. This is really error-prone and could be abstracted I think so I started this tiny module.

The first abstraction is the idea that controllers should have simple default routes based on their name. So using this module we could write the above example like the following:

architect = require('express-resource-architect')
mongoose = require('mongoose')
 
resource = architect(app)
 
resource mongoose.model('User'), require('./controllers/users')

The controller is then as easy as this:

architect = require('express-resource-architect')
 
c = architect.controllers()
 
exports.new = c.new()

This is a really leaky abstraction you may say, but for cases where you need more control we also got some awesomeness: middleware. These are tinier pieces of a controller (in fact every controller consists of middleware) which can be used independly. This does the same as the above example:

architect = require('express-resource-architect')
 
m = architect.middleware()
 
exports.new = [
  m.new()
  m.view 'users/new', true
]

I'm currently working hard to shape the API and stabilize this thing. Currently it's an idea that follows frameworks like sails or ruby on rails but without the bloat and the loss of flexibility since it always remains express.