node recap

Figured I would whip up a quick blog post during lunch to mention some recent additions / releases to node projects.

Express Mongoose

Aaron recently released express-mongoose which is a fantastic plugin for any of you using Mongoose allowing you to pass query promises directly to res.render(), res.partial(), and `res.send() calls, deferring rendering until complete.

For example you may currently be nesting as shown below:

var News = db.model('News');
app.get('/dashboard', function (req, res, next) {
  req.user.getLikes(function(err, likes){
    if (err) return next(err);
    News.getLatest(function(err, news){
      if (err) return next(err);
      res.render('dashboard', { likes: likes, latestNews: news });
    });
  });
});

well now you can simply pass the promises, next()ing exceptions. Much cleaner!

var News = db.model('News');
app.get('/dashboard', function (req, res) {
  res.render('dashboard', {
      likes: req.user.getLikes()
    , latestNews: News.getLatest()
  });
});

Asset

asset is a tiny but helpful utility written with node to manage assets such a JavaScript or css libraries. You could think of this as the homebrew or bundler of assets.

Installing assets is extremely simple, and by default will be installed to ./public. For example we can install g.raphael and g.pie to ./public/javascripts which will install the raphael dependency as well:

$ asset g.raphael g.pie -o public/javascripts

   install : raphael@1.4.7
   install : g.raphael@0.4.1
   install : g.pie@0.4.1
  download : raphael@1.4.7
  complete : raphael@1.4.7 public/javascripts/raphael.js
  download : g.raphael@0.4.1
  complete : g.raphael@0.4.1 public/javascripts/g.raphael.js
  download : g.pie@0.4.1
  complete : g.pie@0.4.1 public/javascripts/g.pie.js

Last night I added a tiny patch which adds support for assets.json, which you can add to your project to list dependencies. For example this file might contain something like below

{
     "g.raphael": "0.4.1"
   , "jquery": "1.5.2"
   , "modernizr": "1.7"
 }

Which we can then install with a single command:

$ asset

    install : g.raphael@0.4.1
 dependency : raphael@1.4.7
    install : raphael@1.4.7
    install : jquery@1.5.2
    install : modernizr@1.7
   download : jquery@1.5.2
   complete : jquery@1.5.2 public/jquery.js
   download : raphael@1.4.7
   complete : raphael@1.4.7 public/raphael.js
   download : g.raphael@0.4.1
   complete : g.raphael@0.4.1 public/g.raphael.js
   download : modernizr@1.7
   complete : modernizr@1.7 public/modernizr.js

Cluster updates

Cluster is a multi-process server manager for node. Recent additions now allow you to run cluster without a server, which is great for processing job queues! below is an example of how to utilize cluster for such a task:

var cluster = require('../');

var proc = cluster()
  .set('workers', 4)
  .use(cluster.debug())
  .start();

if (proc.isWorker) {
  var id = process.env.CLUSTER_WORKER;
  console.log('  worker #%d started', id);
  setInterval(function(){
    console.log('  processing job from worker #%d', id);
  }, 1000);
} else {
  setTimeout(function(){
    proc.close();
  }, 10000);
}

Express Resource

For those of you who have been looking for resourceful routing for Express, you may have heard or express-resource already, and if not express-resource utilizes regular Express HTTP verb/pathname routing dressed up in an API better suited for resources.

Installation:

$ npm install express-resource

Below is an example use-case providing actions for forums and their associated threads. By calling forum.add(threads) routes such as GET /forums/:forum/threads/:thread and GET /forums/:forum/threads are mapped to action callbacks. This library also supports auto-loading of resources, providing them as req.forum, req.thread etc instead of manually doing this using the values of req.params.forum or req.params.thread.

  var forum = app.resource('forum', actionsHere)
    , threads = app.resource('thread', actionsHere)

  forum.add(threads);

For more details check out the documentation and tests in the repo.

RedisKit

Week or so ago I started a small high-level redis library called rediskit. I started creating the lower level structures, and will be building up to composite structures and higher level abstractions.

Install with:

$ npm install rediskit

Example usage:

var list = new List('pets')
  , client = list.client
  , tobi = new Hash('pet:tobi')
  , loki = new Hash('pet:loki')
  , jane = new Hash('pet:jane');

list.rpush('tobi');
list.rpush('jane');
list.rpush('loki');

tobi.set('age', 1);
loki.set('age', 0.5);
jane.set('age', 3);

list.sort.by('pet:*->age').get('#').get('pet:*->age').end(function(err, res){
  res.should.eql(['loki', '0.5', 'tobi', '1', 'jane', '3']);
});

RedBack

I also just saw a tweet about a similar library redback which is worth checking out if you are a redis fan.

Installation:

$ npm install redback

Usage:

var redback = require('redback').createClient();

//redback.create<Structure>(key)

var user1 = redback.createHash('user1');
user.set({username:'chris', password:'redisisawesome'}, callback);

var log = redback.createCappedList('log', 1000);
log.push('Log message ...');

var user3 = redback.createSocialGraph(3);
user3.follow(1, callback);