restless api: RESTful APIs for the highly impatient

Under development

• restless-api takes a JSON spec of your APIs like you would send your user (no code inside it) and handles all the Express routing

• the goal has been to be as-simple-as-possible at all decision points, but there is support for model/controller breakdown and dependency injection if you want it

• Available on NPM @ https://www.npmjs.org/package/restless-api

Example: see Node Annotator Store backend

• A NodeJS implementation of the Annotator backend is using restless-api

Quick start

• Add restless-api to your project: npm install --save restless-api
• In your app file, call restless-api with JSON having two keys
  • links: user-facing API spec (NO CODE, literally ready to send your user)
  • nouns: contains a reference to a module (or optionally a controller and model) for each noun

Example:

(Run node examples/app.js to try it!)

var restlessApi = require('../index.js');
var apiRouter = restlessApi({
    "links": {
        /* each key in 'links' is a REST noun from 'nouns' at end */
        "user": { 
             "index": {
                "url": "/users",
                "method": "GET",
                "desc": "Show a list of users"
            },
            "read": {
                "url": "/users/:id",
                "method": "GET",
                "desc": "Get a user by ID"
            },
            "create": {
                "url": "/users",
                "method": "POST",
                "desc": "Add a new user"
            },
            "update": {
                "url": "/users/:id",
                "method": "PUT/POST",
                "desc": "Update an existing user with ID=:id" 
             }
             /* each key in a given noun denotes a REST endpoint (url+method)
                and will be routed to the callback in the noun module associated with the same key.
                
                for example, 'update' above will invoke the function 'update' in 'lib/users.js' - 
                because that is the module associated with the noun in 'nouns' below 
             */
        }
    },
    "nouns": {
    
         "user": {
            "model": require("./lib/userModel.js"),
            "controller": require("./lib/userController.js")
         }
    
    /*
       - Addl nouns:
         You can add more nouns here

       - Nouns can be specified with a single file:
            "products": require("./lib/products.js")

       - Or you can specify a model and controller separately, e.g.:
         "products": {
            "model": require("./lib/productModel.js"),
            "controller": require("./lib/productController.js")
         }
        -  The callbacks in the 'controller' module will be invoked with the model dependency injected
     */
    }  
});

• In your app file you use the router returned as normal:

// The routes above are relative; restless-api returns an express.Router object
// which you can mount wherever you want
// e.g. "/api":
express.use("/api", apiRouter);

express.listen(3000);
console.log("Listening on port 3000!");

• And then create modules for each noun, e.g. ./lib/userController.js might be:

module.exports =  {
           index: function index(req, res, User) {
           //      ...
           },
           read: function read(req. res, User) {
           //       ...
           },
//...
};

• Where the 3rd user argument is the user model (this example used one unified model+controller for user noun, but if they were separate this would be the controller and it would get the model ref there)