which framework to use (express, meteor or koa)

[Roelof Wobben]

Hello,

I want to try to make a financial app in node,js by using a web frameworks.

As far as I can see there are a few I can use like meteor, express or koa.

Which one can I use the best and why ?

Roelof

[Aredridel]

All are good, and without knowing your context -- skill, team size and training, goals, and with finance, regulatory context, so it's impossible to say to use one specific set of tools for your task.

Express is not terribly opinionated, and usable as a library of components to build applications. It has a large, rich ecosystem with it. It's well used and mature.

Koa is similar in design to express, but uses generators to make the API perhaps more convenient. Generators are not yet available in stable releases of node so that may present a downside for you.

I know less about meteor, but what I hear as success stories are almost all prototypes, and data synchronization  heavy applications with lots of client state.

You may also want to consider Hapi for your work too.

Hope this helps,

Aria

[Roelof Wobben]

Op zaterdag 20 december 2014 19:28:12 UTC+1 schreef Aria Stewart:

On Dec 20, 2014 10:27 AM, Roelof Wobben <rwo...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I want to try to make a financial app in node,js by using a web frameworks.
>
> As far as I can see there are a few I can use like meteor, express or koa.
>
> Which one can I use the best and why ?

All are good, and without knowing your context -- skill, team size and training, goals, and with finance, regulatory context, so it's impossible to say to use one specific set of tools for your task.

Skill : beginner with node.js

Team size ; 1 (me alone)

Goals : to make a sort of e-commerce site where we can keep track on which member borrows which tool. Later on implement cash on hands, bank accounts to keep track on the finances and a part to keep track of members data like name, adress and so on.

I have a accounting background

When you need more things, just ask.

Roelof

 

[Alexander Praetorius]

or http://sailsjs.org
or http://loopback.io
which can be combined with frontend libraries and/or frameworks of your choice

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[Adam Reynolds]

Also consider loopback.io

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[Aria Stewart]

> On 20 Dec 2014, at 13:39, Roelof Wobben <rwo...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Op zaterdag 20 december 2014 19:28:12 UTC+1 schreef Aria Stewart:
> On Dec 20, 2014 10:27 AM, Roelof Wobben <rwo...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > I want to try to make a financial app in node,js by using a web frameworks.
>
>

> Skill : beginner with node.js
> Team size ; 1 (me alone)
> Goals : to make a sort of e-commerce site where we can keep track on which member borrows which tool. Later on implement cash on hands, bank accounts to keep track on the finances and a part to keep track of members data like name, adress and so on.
> I have a accounting background

None of the frameworks are going to be particularly better than others.

With a team of 1, you can do what you like easily. Only you has to know what's going on, so things that are still quirky like koa and generators aren't too weird.

You will find a ton of information out there about Express due to its age (though you'll find it for versions 2, 3, and 4 -- be aware!) and so that can be a good choice. My personal favorite is express, but that's not a deeply held conviction, just that I find it pleasantly modular, and easy to discard parts I'm not using.

All the tools everyone's mentioned are good though!

Your more interesting question is going to be about databases than web frameworks. That's where things of interest to a financial app can get dicey.

Aria

[Andi Nugroho Dirgantara]

If you want to learn Express, I recommend SailsJS instead, it has good learning curve for beginners (as long as you has experience in Javascript of cource), easy to use and learn, flexible, and also has a good directory structure. It's built on top of Express, Socket.io, has very helpful ORM library called Waterline ORM that support many databases, auto generated API actions called BlueprintAPI, and so on.

But if you want to build database-driven application, I assume finance app is a database-driven apps rather than complex-algorithm apps, so KeystoneJS is also good for you. It's very easy to use, but strictly using MongoDB only as database. I think finance apps need more "secure transaction" databases that supported by any SQL's even you can control it in application layer.

Pure ExpressJS, Loopback, and Koa is also good, but it's rather hard to develop starting apps since you must write your code from very scratch.

I know nothing about MeteorJS since I and my company never use that.

But still keep in mind that nothing is most good among the other. If there any, of course other frameworks will discontinued, lol.

Hope this can help.

[zladuric]

With your "skill level: beginner", I would definitely recommend Express. Koa is not out-of-the-box ready on a typical node installation, and all others presume that you have previous knowledge of the framework itself.

And you would end up having to learn more then just Node.js, usual patterns, javascript specifics, you would also get confused by the framework "magic".

Express is very distributed, well documented, lots of examples, lots of questions you will have already answered on Stackoverflow. Besides that, once you pass a mandatory tutorial or two online (pick anything, I suggest one of the video tutes),  you won't have to remember everything from that tutorial. After a few basic things, Express is pretty forgiving and you can make all beginner mistakes right away, and then fix them and work on them as your skill grows.

Zlatko

[Roelof Wobben]

Op zondag 21 december 2014 03:54:48 UTC+1 schreef Aria Stewart:

Correct, that is also a point I have to investigate. I see that a lot of people uses mongo db so that will be the first one for me to look at.

Roelof

 

[Alexander Praetorius]

i evaluated sailsjs and loopback against each other.

i like the tooling around loopback a lot and the project structure seems to be less oppinionated and feels a bit simpler for now...

instead of waterline, i have lots of loopback-connectors that somehow use juggler if i understand that right.
while sailsjs uses api blueprints, loopback uses swagger2.0.
...underneath, both use expressjs

sailsjs is backed by http://balderdash.co (it has ~4700 commits https://github.com/balderdashy/sails/ , last commit 6 hours ago)
=> first commit in january 2012
loopback is backed by http://strongloop.com (it has ~1300 commits https://github.com/strongloop/loopback/ , last commit 4 days ago)
=> first commit in april 2013

loopback is kind of the official maintainer of expressjs and a lot of nodejs core developers work there, as far as i understand.

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[Andi Nugroho Dirgantara]

Sorry I wrong about Loopback since I never use them :D but basically it's true that Express is good for beginner. Loopback is backed by Strongloop, one of the company that serious in NodeJS and also sponsored ExpressJS. Maybe next year I will learn Loopback, it looks so promising.

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Andi N. Dirgantara

Platform Developer

NoLimit Indonesia

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[Sam Roberts]

On Sun, Dec 21, 2014 at 7:07 PM, Alexander Praetorius <d...@serapath.de> wrote:
> sailsjs is backed by http://balderdash.co (it has ~4700 commits
> https://github.com/balderdashy/sails/ , last commit 6 hours ago)
> => first commit in january 2012
> loopback is backed by http://strongloop.com (it has ~1300 commits
> https://github.com/strongloop/loopback/ , last commit 4 days ago)
> => first commit in april 2013

I don't think the stats above give a useful reflection of loopback
development, and from a quick look, not of sails, either.

loopback is built in node style out of a number of components, mostly
optional, such as loopback DB connectors, core modules, swagger
support, yeoman tools for scaffolding and maintaining apps, etc.
Loopback is only the core, it changes not as fast the constellation
around it.

From what I can see, sails is also composed of a set of modules, so
its activity is similarly not reflected by a single repo.

As for the advice to use express because its simple... I would agree
its worth working through a few express tutorials to get a feel for
it, its the foundation of a number of other modules, including
loopback.

That simplicity comes at quite a price, though - you have to
reimplement yourself a large set of features likely to be found in any
application, or worse, troll npmjs.org to try to figure out which of
the zillions of modules out there you should use to compose your app.
That latter is itself a significantly difficult thing to do for a
beginner to node. So using express for its simplicity just dumps you
fast into not so simple waters.

One reason to consider a higher level framework such as loopback is
it works harder to cover a set of commonly required features (like an
ORM, completely absent from express), while at the same time giving
you the opportunity, once you've developed your own preferences, to
swap out components once you discover the areas where specialization
is truly important to you or your app.

That's my two bits,
Sam

[Alexander Praetorius]

@Sam

how would you compare sailsjs to loopback, because i agree with you, that the metrics i chose are lacking, but its also to so easy to compare...

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[Sam Roberts]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 10:44 AM, Alexander Praetorius <d...@serapath.de> wrote:
> @Sam
>
> how would you compare sailsjs to loopback, because i agree with you, that
> the metrics i chose are lacking, but its also to so easy to compare...

I would compare by features relevant to intended use.

And I agree its easy, but it doesn't show anything useful. Is it that
sails is more active? Is it that loopback is more stable? Maybe you
are just seeing that they factor their code bases differently, which
is profoundly uninteresting?

The loopback GUI for scaffolding and run-time control, for example,
last saw a commit 24 minutes ago, and its where most of the LB team
has been pouring effort over the last month, leading to last weeks
release of arc, something that sails probably doesn't have an
equivalent of: http://strongloop.com/strongblog/arc-node-js-api-announcement/
If you don't want something like Arc, then it doesn't matter, of
course.

Remember the old stories of managers who rewarded devs by bugs-fixed?
And how the bug-count went up, so they could get raises for fixing
them? I'd hate to see a situation where developers attempted to split
their commits into smaller and smaller changes to up their commit
counts, to appear more productive and attract mind share :-(.

Sam

[Alexey Petrushin]

Node.js isn't the best option for this app. With RoR or similar python framework you'll do it easier and faster.

Because there's no callbacks and most of node web frameworks are too low level.

Your app is not the case node js was created and tuned for.

[Aria Stewart]

I respectfully disagree!

[Alexey Petrushin]