Jackson

Jackson is a web application framework for Node with a focus on simplicity, composability and ease of use, including the batteries you need to build everyday web applications.

Jackson is a new project under early development.

Quick-and-dirty example

Jackson is currently undocumented and you shouldn't use it yet for non-trivial/production sites.

Here is an example which outlines how routes, controllers and applications work in Jackson:

class Blog extends Jackson.Application
  @route '/', 'Posts#index'

  @route '/posts', 'Posts#index'
  @route '/posts/:id', 'Posts#show'

  # or use shorthand to create a whole resource à la Rails
  # @resource('/posts', 'Posts')

  templateRoot: __dirname + '/templates'

class Blog.Posts extends Jackson.Controller
  templateDir: 'posts'

  index: -> @render('index.html', posts: Post.all())
  show: (id) -> @render('show.html', post: Post.find(id))

class Blog.Api extends Jackson.Application
  @resource '/posts', 'Posts'

  class @Posts extends Jackson.Controller
    index: ->
      @respond(Post.all())

    show: (id) ->
      if post = Post.find(id)
        @respond(post)
      else
        @respond(404)

class Admin extends Jackson.Application
  @route '/', 'Dashboard#overview'
  templateRoot: __dirname + '/admin_templates'

  class @Dashboard extends Jackson.Controller
    @beforeAll 'authenticate'

    # contrived example, demonstrates before filters
    authenticate: ->
      if @req.ip isnt '127.0.0.1'
        @respond(403, 'Local only.')
        true

    overview: -> @render 'overview.html'

blog = new Blog
blog.mount '/api', new Blog.Api
blog.mount '/admin', new Admin

blog.listen(1234)

Command-line interface

Jackson has a neat command line interface, with the jack command.

Create a new application:

$ jack new MyApp

$ cd my_app/

Pass --js to jack new if you would prefer not to use CoffeeScript.

Start the application:

$ jack server

This is the default command, so you can just use: $ jack.

The default Jackson port is 1234. Pass another like jack --port 5858

You can also listen on a Unix socket with jack --socket /tmp/myapp.socket

Application REPL!

You can drop into a REPL with your application loaded:

$ jack repl ('r' for short)

Your app is available as app. You'll also have Jackson and your application class defined.

If you want to expose more to the REPL, add stuff too app.repl like:

app.repl.greet = -> 'hello'

When in the REPL, you'll be able to use greet().