Fortune.js - RESTful, HATEOAS APIs made easy | Hacker News Reader

Fortune.js - RESTful, HATEOAS APIs made easy

fortunejs.com

26 pointsdaliwali6 comments

This is really cool - it reminds me of Sails.js [0] but is simply a node module you can include in package.json without having to use custom commands to launch the app.

Something they should put as a huge feature at the top (IMO) is that it uses Express & supports Connect middleware.

[0] http://sailsjs.org

Actually, one of my motivations to build this stems from Sails.js. Its ORM, Waterline, currently doesn't support associations between resources, so I built a persistence layer that does that myself. This is crucial because in order to fully support the concept of HATEOAS, resources need to be able to link to each other.

In the future, I might actually cut out Express from this framework, but still accept Connect middleware. The reason for that is because I don't want the user to be concerned about routing or having to manually set routes, so a thinner router might be in order.

Very cool. I'm thinking of trying out Fortune with some changes so that I can serve assets from the same app & try it out with Angular.

OK, it looks like hooking this up with Angular directly is not going to work without pretty major changes. Angular's resource module is set up to work with "broken" JSON APIs out of the box, presumably because most are set up that way.

Angular has way more to it so I'm probably going to leave it as is and continue hacking away at Fortune to make it a little more forgiving with the requests it handles.

I also exposed one more express method in /fortune.js:

    Fortune.prototype.static = function() {
      return express.static.apply(express, arguments);
    };

Since Angular is all client side just creating a public folder was enough to serve up the required pages from the same app:

    app.use(app.static(__dirname + '/public'));

Ah, by the way, you shouldn't need to serve the front-end app from the same server as the API. By default, Fortune gives you CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing), so that clients from any domain can consume it.

Also, Fortune should work out the box with Ember Data and my JSON API adapter: https://github.com/daliwali/ember-json-api . Not to say that you should ditch Angular, but it will probably need quite a bit of modifications to its data layer to get it working with the JSON API spec.

I will be working on a full, non-trivial example of what an Ember.js + Fortune.js application can be in the coming week(s). There is a current implementation that's in production at my company, but its unfortunately closed-source.

I can't believe I missed this post! This project is amazing.

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