I am looking to set up a slightly more involved node app. Forced by twitter to use OAuth to allow using twitter's search api, I put together a couple of very simple node apps (such as this searchable world tweet map). It felt really nice to be using javascript throughout.
I now am looking into a slightly more involved app, where as before I'll use 3rd party logins, but also maintaining data for a user.
I will be wanting to have both a standard web site interface, and REST endpoints for mobile app interaction. I will also want to have a basic Android and iOS app that makes use of the app.
While I could do this myself, I decided to look around to see what was available to handle even more of the grunt work.
A quick search led me to StrongLoop's Loopback framework and it looks slick.
A number of things got me fairly excited about StrongLoop's Loopback framework:
- Project is open source
- Project is obviously vibrant:
- there's a blog post from yesterday (as I write this)
- its Loopback github project has more than 1600 stars
- there had been a commit just nine hours prior to me looking at the github project for the first time.
- They have a quick start on how to set Loopback up on Redhat's OpenShift platform using the commandline (which is nice, as the infrequently-used commands have not stuck in my head yet)
- It's based on Express - not a prerequisite, but that little project was part of my first exposure to the node.js app world, and I'd prefer to stick with it for now.
- A few weeks ago they announced that they have incorporated third-party logins into Loopback - this uses Passport under the hood, which is nice as well
- They have a lot of examples to play with:
- loopback-example-passport: demonstrates how to use LoopBack's user/userIdentity/userCredential models and passport to interact with other auth providers
- loopback-example-full-stack
- loopback-example-office-supplies
- loopback-example-todo
- loopback-example-access-control
- loopback-example-proxy
- strongloop-community/loopback-example-datagraph
- strongloop-community/loopback-example-database
- strongloop-community/loopback-examples-ios
- strongloop-community/loopback-example-ssl
A summary of Loopback and its associated modules is below (from their github site).
This has got me thinking of setting up a boilerplate app that has all the basic endpoints for user management, and has the groundwork for for iOS, Android, and web clients. Then, for a custom app you just start from there and add the extra stuff you need to quickly see if the app/idea has any traction.
No matter what I end up doing shortly, this looks really cool.
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