Nora.js

Sweet, simple express services

A sweet, simple, express-oriented framework for quickly hammering out ES7-style services. Convention over configuration, but hardly any of either, Nora is aware of a Server, Configurations and Services – with the server representing your app.

In terms of lifecycle, Nora apps typically do the following:

• Spin up a Server, which can configure Express as needed
• Add Configurations, potentially instantiating DB connections, wiring up Express routes, etc
• Add Services, which do the business logic of your application
• Start express by listening on the designated port (5000 by default)

Configurations have a two-step lifecycle, Configuration.preConfigure and Configuration.postConfigure respectively. The difference between the two is that the latter is called after all configs have had their Configuration.preConfigure methods run and all services have had their Service.configure methods run – allowing services to be retrieved by name.

A simple example:

svc/DummyService.js:

const nora = require('norajs')
class DummyService extends nora.Service {

  postConfigure(server){
    this.logger.info('Configured!')
  }

  doSomething(){
    return 'Dummy service did something!'
  }
}

module.exports = new DummyService()

app.js:

const nora = require('norajs')
class DummyRouter extends nora.Configuration {

  postConfigure(server, config, idx){
    const { app } = server         
    const { DummyService } = server.named

    const router = nora.Router()
    router.get('/dummy', async (req, res, next) => {
      res.send({name: 'Jimbo Jones', message: DummyService.doSomething() })
    })

    app.use('/test', router)
  }
}

const server = new nora.Server({
  basePath: __dirname,
  nora: { autoscan: true }
})
server.addConfig(new DummyRouter())
server.start()

Note that we specified autoscan: true on the server's nora property, allowing nora to scan both the ./config and ./svc folders for Services and Configurations respectively.