This looks interesting, I've been doing a lot similar work as I'm currently building an open source CMS for nodejs. It's a lot more complex than Roots however the goal of the project is to make it easy for developers to build websites and applications. It'll come with a full featured and extendable admin control panel and built in support for all the common stuff like authentication, user Management, content management, blog posts, asset publishing, etc.
The nodejs side handles the API which automatically generates REST routes for your resources, and you have the ability to write custom API endpoints as well.
The website and admin panel are automatically built using Grunt and require.js and depend only on the API so you're free to host your website on S3 or another server entirely. The client-side website will call the API for content, authentication, etc. The admin panel is written in AngularJS (So far it's incredibly responsive and feels almost native!) and it's up to the user what to use for the main website.
One nice thing is during development it'll watch your files for changes, rebuild the site on the fly and update the client view using socket.io. No more constantly refreshing the page after every change! In production mode everything is bundled and minified using r.js.
If this sounds interesting to you guys then I should have something to show HN in the next few weeks :)
Sounds like a cool project - excited to see it for sure. The tough part with projects like this is making sure that it's simple but still flexible. For example, can you fully customize the rest routes, or are those just generated? If a developer knows enough to work with routing, models, and the back end, why wouldn't they just use rails and activeadmin for the admin panel? If your project is any less simple/flexible than rails, that will be a tough compromise.
Either way, this sounds like a pretty sweet project, I'd love to check it out when it's released. What are you thinking about calling it (just so i recognize)?
I completely agree with your points. I constantly encounter the same problems when I use other frameworks so I want everything to be fully flexible.
At the moment the REST routes are generated for resources and available through the api/resources endpoint. (For example, /api/resources/users/) you can however add whatever other routes you like to /api/ using your own controllers.
I'm thinking about adding a simple query language to the REST route syntax to take care of some common requests. That may work something like this: /api/resources/users/$near/lat,lon
It's still early stages though so I'll probably go through a lot of ideas before I'm happy with it!
It'll be called Nails (or Nails Framework, Nails CMS, whatever sounds closest to the finished idea) - I have the domain nails.io which I'll be using for this project.
Cheers. I've used RailwayJS in the past but I switched to LocomotiveJS[1] which I find much nicer to work with and it's incredibly flexible too.
I'm using locomotive in this project on top of express to help with controllers and routing, though I'm thinking about using flatiron[2] which is a pretty solid looking set of modules for routing, middleware, etc.
The nodejs side handles the API which automatically generates REST routes for your resources, and you have the ability to write custom API endpoints as well.
The website and admin panel are automatically built using Grunt and require.js and depend only on the API so you're free to host your website on S3 or another server entirely. The client-side website will call the API for content, authentication, etc. The admin panel is written in AngularJS (So far it's incredibly responsive and feels almost native!) and it's up to the user what to use for the main website.
One nice thing is during development it'll watch your files for changes, rebuild the site on the fly and update the client view using socket.io. No more constantly refreshing the page after every change! In production mode everything is bundled and minified using r.js.
If this sounds interesting to you guys then I should have something to show HN in the next few weeks :)