Ghetto

Javascript is a ghetto, we all know that. But it seems there is no way out, the ghetto gets larger and larger every day, more and more libraries open their doors, people from all backgrounds are moving in, even large respected companies seem to like the ghetto now. Ok, my imagination is over for now, let's get to the point. What is this? Why is it?

Ghetto is a framework for building websites. But there are other frameworks, right? Yeah... so there are basically two problems that I want to solve, the first is error handling, this is terrible in most, except for maybe Koa. If an express.js route does not capture an error, it does not bubble up and your whole app crashes without a proper stack trace, simply not an ideal situation. But using ES7 async/await coroutines we can capture errors using try/catch over a block or simply by attaching an error method to .catch. This is great news except that it is not available yet in node, we are left with generators. Generators can be used together with the co package for example to accomplish this same thing, capturing errors over a block and providing a stack trace, but the solution is just not as nice as the async/await would have been. Luckily with the development of transpilers such as babel we can now write our code using async/await syntax and transpile this to generators. This is how the first problem is solved, routes in ghetto should use async/await syntax, they are also wrapped so that a configurable error handler is called if there was an unhandled error in that route.

The second problem with micro-frameworks like express.js is that it does not force its users in to any particular way of organizing your code and there are many ways to configure them badly. For new comers this is not a good thing, some configurations are hard to get correct but there are also too many insignificant choices that take the fun out of producing something useful. I have worked many years with Django and there are some problems with Django for sure but getting productive is not one of them. These decisions also pose a problem for larger projects involving more than one developer, somebody has to make all these decisions, which could lead to some very boring and unproductive bike shed discussions.

A lot of things are not implemented like a default templating engine, rest library etc.

(Pre)-installation

npm install -g ghetto-command

Create your first app using ghetto init

ghetto init testapp

Run your first app using babel-node

cd testapp
npm install ghetto babel-core babel-plugin-transform-async-to-generator
ghetto run

Navigate to http://localhost:4100

Now try http://localhost:4100/sleep

Oops, open up the file router.js. This is where the routing is configured. Every row in the array is a route, the first position is the route path (specified in the same way as in express.js), the second is the either first route function (middleware) to call or a comma separated string with allowed methods, by default only get is accepted, if you want to change allowed methods pass something like 'get,post'. You can append more middleware in the row after this. Middleware are called in the order as they appear. Ok so now have a look in routes/demo.js There a require('sleep') causing our error. Break the application using ctrl+c and do npm install sleep and start the application again:

./node_modules/.bin/babel-node ghetto.js

Try http://localhost:4100/sleep a second time.