Survey: rapid application development

Survey: rapid application development

Currently the tendency for JS/Node technologies is to use various modules or libraries according to our needs, and integrate them together manually. A few projects offer starting points for web applications by packaging some libraries together:

• backbone-express-mongoose-socketio
• express-mvc-bootstrap

As of early 2012 we start to find more coherent and complete frameworks, among them GettyJS and RailwayJS (the first one seems a bit more mature, the other more feature-loaded), both largely inspired by Ruby on Rails. [Apr. 2012 update: See also Chaplin, released in February, based on Backbone]

RailwayJS (http://railwayjs.com/)

• Full MVC stack
• Resource-based routing
• ORM (mysql, mongodb, redis, neo4j)
• Multi-locale support
• Coffee-script support (howto)
• Generators for model, controller, scaffold
• Testing: nodeunit, cucumis, code coverage reporting
• Debugging: railway console
• Templating (EJS, Jade)

GettyJS (http://geddyjs.org/)

• MVC
• Resource-based routing
• App and resource generators
• Content-negotiation
• Templating (EJS)
• No ORM, but data validation
• Basic testing

FlatironJS (http://flatironjs.org)

• Split in independent components
• Routing - component 'Director'
• Templating - component 'Plates'
• ORM (Mongo, CouchDB, Redis, etc). - component 'Resourceful'

Play Framework (http://www.playframework.org/)

• MVC (The same way like Symfony , CakePHP or Rails but in Java)
• ORM (JPA, Hibernate, EJB... compatible)
• Routing file which uses Url rewriting (for nice Url)
• Templating (with Scala)
• MultiDatabase support (MySQL, PostGreSQL...)
• Authentication and Authorization (by roles)
• Asynchronous calls and Internationalization
• Maven compatible
• Powerful Web Service client
• More features (http://www.playframework.org/documentation/1.2/libs)