I'm seriously considering moving from Python to Node.js- the holy grail is within reach....but I do still love Django's Admin interface. Is anyone aware of a new framework that attempts to bring to Node.js what Django did for Python?
Django, as you probably already know, was meant to provide developers with a fully-featured web framework, capable of "building apps fast and with less code". To achieve that, Django makes a lot of assumptions for you; it decides what ORM to use, what templating engine to use, etc.
Node, on the other hand, is not a web framework, but a platform. It is so thin that you have more freedom deciding how to do things. The idea here is that there is not a single way of doing things.
Now, to answer your question, express is one of many frameworks that try to bring Node to a higher level. It is nowhere close to Django in terms of features, but you can find plenty of pluggable libraries to do what you want. In your case, you can find a very nice admin interface here: https://github.com/wearefractal/smog
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I am learning Node JS. It had almost learnt 70%. I am very interested in Backend Development but I'm not interested in Frontend development. My question is how do I practice my Node Skills. I only know HTML, CSS in Frontend. How can I make projects in Node JS without knowing Frontend? Or do I need to learn frontend frameworks such as React too to make projects.
You can build an API and use postman to make requests. Start with something simple and keep improving by refactoring your code.
You can work on the API creation part but in my opinion, you must learn one frontend framework it will not only increase your skill sets but also help you to coordinate with frontend easily and take more advantage of it than the projects you will build will be more useful and advanced as well.
You could also focus on implementing some algorithms and data structures starting of with simple ones such as LinkedLists, ArrayLists, sorting algorithms and then move on to (binary) trees and graphs.
These will be required for any programming language to solve (complex) problems and there are many books and internet resources for this. Just search for algorithms and data structures and you'll get plenty. You don't need more than a console application with some simple console.log() statements to implement algorithms - no need for fancy UI.
Last but not least, you should certainly have a look at TypeScript if you want to develop more complex backend applications.
If you really want to do Web Development though it is certainly helpful to have a basic understanding of frontend development or know the basics of common frameworks such as React, Vue, Angular or Svelte.
As others have mentioned for API development you could also just use Postman to send requests.
I have a few questions regarding some popular web frameworks. I can find pros and cons about all the frameworks, but which fits best regarding theese criteria:
The website needs to be as secure as possible. It will need a lot of real-time feautures, an own mobile app (native or hybrid, with notifications) and the application will also run a lot of background processes.
Django has some nice security features included, but suits bad for mobile development. The solution is then probably making a completely RESTful API tougheter with Angular and Ionic, but doesn't you loose most of Django's built in security solutions? Will it then be just as safe using a Node framework like Express, and manually escape user input, and manually prevent database injection? Will a good user authentication system then be equal as much work?
In addition, will it be painful to mix synchronous and asynchronous programing using Django channels to implement websockets and real-time features. I don't have any experience using Django channels, but I really likes the simplicity of Socket IO together with Express. Even if it can be challenging to program asynchronous in a Node environment, will it be just as hard using Django channels at the end? And since Django is a full framework, will you after a while have to rewrite a lot of the inbuilt classes and functions? Is it still easier than using Flask with Flask SocketIo? Will it be a good idea to use Python for background jobs beside the Node environment?
I know there already exists enough framework vs framework questions, but i would appreciate any advice and experiences.
Just go ahead and use the socketio in node or flask it is much more adviceable than using the socketio libary in Django.
I'm wondering if some of you veterans could provide some guidance to some of us noobs.
Is there any advantage to writing vanilla Node over using Express? More specifically, any particular scenario where using Express will not be an option? And lastly for the tasks that you can use Express for, how deep should you go within the layers of abstraction to find out what's going on?
I mean there are plenty of people who can create robust and powerful web applications and they have no clue what the hell Express is actually doing for them.
Much appreciated
If I were you, I'd use express.
To be honest, Express isn't much of a web framework. It's really barebones, and barely adds any functionality on top of Node core.
With this said, however, there are some benefits:
For better or worse, express has become the 'defacto' default web framework for Node developers. There's a lot of information about it.
Express provides some core things that are useful: a routing layer (to map functions to URLs), an 'application' object that you can bind variables to for settings, etc. -- and a simple middleware model that lets you add functionality to your app easily.
Because express is so close to 'barebones' node, you can still write raw node code to work with it. It isn't at all complicated like other 'larger' frameworks: django, rails, etc.
There are a TON of third-party express middlewares you can use which add all sorts of functionality to your site. This makes building your site easier.
Finally -- the biggest reason to use express is that it does almost nothing. It isn't significantly different from using raw node except that it provides some simple abstractions over lower level stuff.
Because express is so simple, it means you don't need to learn much to use it, and can write your app in whatever way you want (it doesn't enforce any sort of patterns).
I'd like to add a few things here that might help you out. One thing that I have come to realize with software engineering is that there is never a "catch all" answer to a lot of these types of questions. Since each application is different, it is a good idea to look at the challenges and figure out what is the best tool for the job.
If you look at some of the performance tests done on the frameworks you notice that vanilla node is ultra performant. But most of the time your application isn't going to need to handle 8000 requests per second, and even if it does you can always scale your server horizontally nowadays. So you trade off a little bit of speed to gain a few benefits, such as:
Much easier to write.
The code base, in my opinion, is much easier to maintain.
A lot of the little gotchas are taken care of by the framework so you don't have to be a Node.js god.
Middleware.
Now, that doesn't mean that every single application should use express. A lot do because it is about as barebones as it gets. For instance, Walmart created Hapi because they claim that it is easier to maintain their code base with a 'configuration first' approach. So maybe if you are going to have this monster backend and a monster team, Hapi might be a good choice. If implementing something with real-time you might want to use something like socketcluster.io to help you scale websockets. It is all about picking the right tool for the right job.
That being said, there are advantages to building a server with vanilla Node, especially when learning to develop node apps. Since frameworks abstract a lot of the lower level stuff it takes away the opportunity to pick up some cool node tricks here or there. Or a lot of times if a framework is insufficient or an npm package is doing something weird it is good to have that knowledge of vanilla node under your belt to really understand what is going on. Having the skill of knowing how Node.js works is such a benefit when working with any framework.
First of all, I have seen this question: How to best create a RESTful API in Node.js and it has pointed me towards mers, which has been a great help.
But I have also been reading a lot of good things about derbyjs and it does look really interesting.
So my questions, does it make sense to use derbyjs for ceating a REST API (real-time features might be useful in the future, but not a 100% certain at this pont.)? And is it any better or worse than mers?
I am really grateful for any help.
Edit:
If anyone is interested, decided now to use sails.js: http://sailsjs.org/
The strength of Derby is that the same views (i.e. rendering templates into HTML) can be executed on the client as well as on the server. So for building a webapp, you won't have to explicitly code a REST API and then use it from the client-side JavaScript, instead you just write your views and Derby does the rest.
So if you're looking into making a REST API only (as your question states) and no HTML, there is no advantage in using Derby. It's the wrong tool for the job.
It depends on what you're looking for exactly. Derby.js is built on top of Express.js which has excellent support for creating a REST API. This also means that anything you can do in Express, you could also do in Derby. If you want real-time features, and the ability to build out a REST API, Derby.js is an excellent choice. It's also one of the reasons that people recommend Derby over something like Meteor (currently Meteor does not have support for REST endpoints, but it will hopefully in the future so also something you might want to keep your eye on, if you're in the market for real-time framework). However, if you're not looking for a node framework with an emphasis on real-time functionality, Derby is not the right choice. I would however recommend looking into Express.js to build a REST API. We use it currently for that purpose and it works really well. There are also a number of libraries and packages that play nicely with Express, so in the future if your needs change, it's easy to find something that works well with Express.
Anyway, I would recommend checking out some basic tutorials for how to create a REST API in Express because once you're able to successfully do that, adding some of the real-time features of Derby.js is fairly straightforward.
Basic tutorial on creating a REST API in Express.
http://coenraets.org/blog/2012/10/creating-a-rest-api-using-node-js-express-and-mongodb/
As stated in the title, I would like to know if it's safe to develop a website using one of the actuals "omg" platforms that are Node.js and Ringo.js at their actual version.
Also, I would like to know if they support cookies/sessions and how do they deals with multi-fields post (fieldname[] in PHP).
Thank you
--Edit--
Thanks for all the links guys.
What can you tell me about Ringojs ?
Since I haven't figured which platform to start playing with. I must admit that the fact it can use Java seamlessly really impress me. The only available XSLT 2.0 library is in Java. I could use it as a templating system.
Is there anyone who had the chance to play with Ringojs?
From my experience using both, Ringo is more stable and "safer" for production use but you can comfortably deploy both. In addition to the ability to wrap existing Java libraries that you mention, you also get the benefit of being able to run it in an existing webapp container which manages the lifecycle of the application for you and ensures its availability.
That being said, it doesn't have to be an either or decision. By using my common-node package and assuming you don't use any Java libraries, it's perfectly feasible to maintain a project that runs on both without any changes to the code.
I've also included benchmarks that test the performance of Node.js vs. RingoJS the results of which you can find in the common-node/README.md. To summarize: RingoJS has slightly lower throughput than Node.js, but much lower variance in response times while using six times the RAM with default Java settings. The latter can be tweaked and brought down to as little as twice the memory usage of Node with e.g. my ringo-sunserver but at the expense of decreased performance.
Node.js is stable, so yes it's safe to use. Node.js is capable of handling cookies, sessions, and multiple fields but are not as easy to manage. Web frameworks solve this problem.
I recommend Express.js, it's an open-source web framework for Node.js which handles all of this and more.
You can download it here:
https://github.com/visionmedia/express
I hope this helped!
Examples of some of the bigger sites running Node.js
https://www.learnboost.com/
http://ge.tt/
https://gomockingbird.com/
https://secured.milewise.com/
http://voxer.com/
https://www.yammer.com/
http://cloud9ide.com/
http://beta.etherpad.org/
http://loggly.com/
http://wordsquared.com/
Yes. It is. https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Projects,-Applications,-and-Companies-Using-Node and https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/modules
cookies/sessions/forms etc http://expressjs.com/ makes it easier
Ringojs is a framework developed by Hannes Wallnöver and uses rhino as it's scripting framework. There are webframeworks, templating-engines, orm-packages and many many more things already available. Have a look at the tutorial featuring a good subset of packages you may use for a simple web-application. It's not too long and straightforward.
Even thought some of those packages used within the tutorial (e.g. ringo-sqlstore]) are marked as 0.8 and come with the hint "consider this being beta" they are already very stable and bugs - if you find one - get fixed or commented on very fast.
And the power of uncountable java-libraries out there is at your fingertips - so if you already have java-knowledge this knowledge isn't wasted. Rhino - the scripting-engine - even enables you to implement interfaces and extend classes. It is possible a little more advanced but i've done it and i know of packages taking advantage of such features (like ringo-ftpserver which is a wrapper around Apache FtpServer written in java)
Another pro for me is - because ringojs is based on java - it works fairly well with multithreading with ringo/worker for example.