With the creation of node.js and various other utilities for writing server side javascript and with the MongoDB using javascript as it's primary access method, it looks like all the pieces for a web framework are now in place.
Are there any frameworks now using exclusively Javascript? (This means for server side interactions, database interactions, code generation, templating, possible MVC architecture)
I came across a couple when I was looking into nodejs platform. There is expressjs and spludo. Although I haven't really used them on a project.
Related
Can someone enlighten me on web frameworks using nodejs? I recently started learning express js from free code camp and while it's all going good I'm confused as to what express entirely is. Is it a full stack framework? Is it purely for backend? I see that you can use different templating engines along with it.
I see things where people say you can use front end frameworks along with it. If express is able to already render views, what's the point of using a front end framework.
Also, what's the difference between express and something meteor, vuejs or react? There's just so many buzzwords out on the web that it's confusing.
Express is a back-end web server framework that runs in nodejs. It is purely for the back-end, though you can define routes/endpoints in it that any front-end can make ajax calls to.
You use Express to make the handling of web server requests and responses easier and fasster. It has support for things like:
Defining routes/urls/endpoints that you want to handle.
Serving static web pages.
Installing middleware for a wide variety of things including sessions and authentication.
Hooking into one of many template rendering engines.
Automatically parsing things like query parameters and form submissions.
Is it a full stack framework?
No. Express does not have a front-end component.
Is it purely for backend?
Yes.
Because Express has become so popular, there are also thousands of add-ins that can plug into express (often as middleware) for things like sessions or authentication.
Since it handles standard HTTP requests, you can use it with any front-end technology from just a plain browser to the many front-end frameworks.
Also, what's the difference between express and something meteor,
vuejs or react?
Express is a back-end framework (runs on the web server). vuejs and react are front-end libraries (run in the browser). Meteor is a full-stack framework. On the back-end, it runs on nodejs and the front-end component runs in the browser.
I see things where people say you can use front end frameworks along
with it. If express is able to already render views, what's the point
of using a front end framework.
Yes, Express can serve the web pages you view and it can use a server-side template engine to render them. But, there's potentially a lot more to a front-end framework than that. For example, express provides nothing to manage a user's interaction with a page in the browser or the building of dynamic web pages that change based on user interaction. If you're building web pages that create, read and update data from a database, then Express by itself provides no automation for doing that while other frameworks can offer a lot of help with that. You could build all that in your own JavaScript that would live in the web pages that Express was serving, but Express provides no help with that at all other than just delivering the JavaScript that you wrote on your own.
If you want to know more about what front-end frameworks do, then I'd suggest you read about frameworks like react, vuejs or angular to understand their value proposition. I'm not saying that you have to use a front-end framework (because you do not). There are zillions of sites on the web that consist of some sort of back-end framework and then plain JS/HTML web pages. Whether a front-end framework would benefit your development depends on what you're doing and how well it aligns with what a particular front-end framework offers.
Here are a couple good articles about what reactjs is:
ReactJS For Stupid People (fyi, I found it a very good article for smart people too).
What is React.js and Why I recommend it to other JavaScript Developers?
This article Full-Stack Frameworks contains a useful discussion of pre-built full-stack functionality such as Meteor vs. using a combination of technology such as MEAN (Mongo + Express + AngularJS + Node.js) or MERN (Mongo + Express + React + Node.js) and also touches on which technologies are more commonly used together.
So I am new to web development and all I've learnt so far is how to write HTML and CSS to make web pages and forms.
I'm specifically looking for a language that will help me store the data that is input into the form onto a database for easy access later.
I think PHP does that, but I was looking for anything JAVA related, and somewhere I could learn how to do it.
So far,
I've looked into JavaScript tutorial on W3Schools, but it seems like JS only helps make the front end more dynamic, but doesn't help store the input data anywhere.
I've also looked into the AngularJS tutorial on CodeSchool and it looks like Angular helps present the forms in a better manner and again, not in storing data anywhere.
Once again,
1) What do you use to collect the data input into a HTML form and store it somewhere?
2) I don't need help making the actual form itself.
Me personally, i use PHP, it allows you to take the data that was inputted and store it in a database. You can also use JavaScript/JQuery with PHP via Ajax that will dynamically fetch and store data.
Any backend lang can do it (python, php, java, ruby, js with node), but each one has it own ways to do it. Even JS at client side can do it, using LocalStorage objects, but it not solve all problems at data storage yet.
Angular is just the client-side. You will need a server, which will handle the requests and store them into a database. I would work with Spring Boot (JAVA) on the server side, and Angular 2 on the client side. Use REST for the communication bewtween them. Its really not hard.
Node.js is a fast Javascript runtime combined with a low-level API similar to the standard libraries of many programming languages (file system access, buffers, streams, i/o, etc.).
Angular is a model-view-controller framework for client-side JS development. It can be used with Node.js as a backend, or anything else. Its main feature is 2-way data-binding, and addresses most of the concerns of a single-page web app within the framework.
React is often compared to Angular, because it is a front-end library, but it is not a framework. It is simply the view layer, with a large ecosystem of open-source projects supporting it. The big conceptual difference is a uni-directional data flow, rather than 2-way data binding. You need a lot more besides React to make a full application, but React handles it's use case exceptionally well. React is amazing on the client side, but it’s ability to be rendered on the server side makes it truly special. This is because React uses a virtual DOM instead of the real one, and allows us to render our components to markup. Node.js makes a great backend for React as well, but again, it can work with any backend.
The MEAN stack is a popular web development stack made up of MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, and Node.js. MEAN has gained popularity because it allows developers to program in JavaScript on both the client and the server. The MEAN stack enables a perfect harmony of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) development: MongoDB stores data in a JSON-like format, Express and Node.js facilitate easy JSON query creation, and AngularJS allows the client to seamlessly send and receive JSON documents.
MEAN is generally used to create browser-based web applications because AngularJS (client-side) and Express (server-side) are both frameworks for web apps. Another compelling use case for MEAN is the development of RESTful API servers. Creating RESTful API servers has become an increasingly important and common development task, as applications increasingly need to gracefully support a variety of end-user devices, such as mobile phones and tablets.
This was the overview of all the new booming technologies.. Based on this you can decide what you need and what you want to learn.. Thanks, Hope this overview helps you to decide.
My favorite for Rest Api is Flask(python micro framework) it is build for create Rest Api. and for php falcon has it own micro frame work. if you use nodejs it is easy to communicate between backend and frontend and good with not sql dB like mongo db.
The right answer should be the database or localStorage/sessionStorage.
The decision in between which answer chose, depends if you want to share the data between Browsers/Computers or if you just want to temporarily store the data for the user so he won't need to fill the form once again.
For temporarily storage chose localStorage/sessionStorage (javascript).
For other cases chose to store the data in a Database.
I'm developing a SPA application and I can't decide, whether to use server-side MVC framework or not.
I have chosen AngularJS as the client-side framework. I was thinking I could use Symfony 2 on the server side, but I also considered using pure OOP oriented PHP. Something like this - database class, model classes (User, UserDbManager, ...). I would use something like Slim to create the REST API.
It seems counterproductive to basically write the same code twice, once on the client side and once on the server side, if I could just use the server to serve the data from the database.
If anyone had done similar decision, I'd be happy, if you'd share your thoughts and tips about it.
I would decide depending on the complexity of the requirement.
If it's a very simple I don't see a huge difference in using a framework or plain old php.
But if it's a complex project, I would definitely go with a framework considering the fact that most of the core functions one might need are already there and quicker development.
Again, it would come down to personal preference too.
Codeigniter has been said easy to learn for beginners in framework.
Symfony and zend are more commercially used (I am not saying others are not, but I see more vacancies asking for symfony or zend development experience).
My suggestion will be if you are having angular js as clientside framework. Then take advantage of it and use some api on server side to just return some json kind of response. Why send html on network when you have angular js on clientside to work with dom. just send data from server to client.
I have also done same. I have jquery for clientside and i am using spring mvc to send response as json.
There are lots of great Javascript libraries out there these days for creating rich web applications and I would like to use one of them for the frontend of a website I'm working on as they seem to provide a way better interface than what you usually see with JSF, Facelets, PrimeFaces, etc...I read so many complaints about the presentation layer for Java EE and on the other hand things seem to be getting better and better when it comes to Javascript and HTML5.
I am wondering how to go about doing this? One JSP and Facelets you can have items in the presentation layer directly mapped to objects on the server. How would you deal with this when instead you use a Javacript library for your frontend?
I will use Java EE on the server but what is the best way of integrating this with a Javascript RIA library on the frontend?
If your question is only about mapping objects from the back-end to the JavaScript front-end, then I suggest using a JAX-RS implementation (RESTEasy, Restlet, Apache CXF, ...) in combination with Jackson (JSON provider).
This combination allows you to publish a REST API with your domain objects converted to JSON, so you can easily access these objects through JavaScript by using AJAX requests.
But of course this leaves a lot of communication handling open to the developer, if you want to have a more complete package, frameworks like Google Web Toolkit are probably a better solution.
A Google Web Toolkit frontend would be easiest to combine with a Java EE backend as it supports this out of the box with it's own communication system. Otherwise RESTful services are easy to communicate with from javascript and are easy to create in Java EE especially with the aid of an IDE like netbeans.
You can create a front end using JavaScript Libraries like JQuery, ExtJS, Dojo etc with HTML/ HTML5.
To communicate with a Java EE server, you can use an Ajax request with the response in xml/json format.
I am developing a Java web services application that is (mostly) to be used by other SOA clients. Currently I am planning on using CXF to publish my various web services & methods using SOAP/XML.
I am now being asked to investigate a thin client web-application for this tool. I have been looking into Javascript libraries such as ExtJS and Dojo -- and they seem really straightforward. Given that this is a web application and not a web site, I really don't think I'll be creating very many static HTML pages -- maybe even just one. Mostly I plan on using an XMLHttpRequest object to hit the web services I already have and take the results and modify the DOM.
However, I have never created a browser-based UI before and in the context of a nearly 100% Javascript application I am trying to figure what role, if any, a server side MVC framwork such as Spring MVC will buy me. Is it needed for this? Whats it good for?
If you use the CXF JavaScript client generator and go for a single page JS application, I don't see what a Java MVC framework will give you (apart from extra complexity).
Spring MVC is a web-based module based on servlets and JSPs. If you're writing a JavaScript UI that calls on services directly, I'd say that you don't need Spring MVC.