Problem/solution

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At Coder Academy we learned how to use Ruby on Rails (RoR), React, and NodeJS.

I really enjoyed the development experience of RoR, using the command line to generate generic templates of code, migrations and perform database operations form the command line. But when it came to learning React and NodeJS I enjoyed the freshness of a newer technology and more dynamic UI (with React) and I enjoyed the freedom of having control over how the architecture of the NodeJS backend played out and being able to separate front end from backend.

I took on the challenge of building a full stack framework for Javascript (JS) because I could see how powerful RoR was with the ability of rapidly generating applications and I wanted to create a similar experience with a JS framework.

Nails is an attempt at creating a solution and adding to the growing open source pool of frameworks and packages of the Javascript community. It is my attempt at creating a solid software architecture that is tightly integrated with a framework that helps you easily and rapidly generate boiler plate code and perform database operations from the command line.

With future iterations I plan to add more features to make the framework more robust and powerful and a valuable tool for the JS community to make use of.

Choices I made in the design process of this project

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This project has been an iterative process of figuring how to structure my code efficiently to make it easily understandable and as dry as possible. I enjoy creating software and apps that are modular in nature. I have had to firstly build up a complete folder/file structure for both BE and FE as a template for the nails app to be able to generate apps. I then had to figure out how to make it modular enough that I could run generations on the command line and have whatever is generated from the Nails framework plug in easily to the application structure.

A particular challenge has been integrating and maintaining database operations to keep the application in line with the migrations that have been generated and run. To address this problem I created an ORM that currently only works with Postgres and Sqlite but will in the future support more database adaptors such as MongoDB and Mysql. Hammered (the ORM I created) provides an interface that the Nails framework can use to create/drop tables, add/remove columns, drop the whole database and then create table models/classes from with generalised methods that are tailored to the database being used. e.g. Posts.create() will create an entry for any of the database types integrated with Hammered.

Features of project I am particularly proud of:

1. The api generator in the FE ./client/src/store/api-generator.js. This is a class that takes an endpoint on creation of a class instance and comes with all the generic CRUD operations. I would like to extend this feature and create an NPM package for it.
2. The use of web sockets to dynamically update the FE by sending the schema generated on the BE to update the tables and columns seen in the browser.
3. My recursiveFileGenerator function in Nails ./lib/utils/file-manipulators.js

Nails is a WIP. There are definitely going to be bugs in the code, refactors that need to be made and unused code lying around from previous attempts at getting the framework to work properly.

Future plans with projects

Nails

1. Add more database operations (remove_columns, rename_table etc)
2. Start building out an extensive component library of basic UI features for the FE that are easy to style and come packaged with the Nails framework
3. Incorporate a theme file for FE to ha e a single source of truth for the them styles of a project (colours, fonts, paddings etc)
4. Refactor the code and extend the api generator for the ability to create custom api requests.
5. Create an extensive test suite that gets generated by Nails for both the client and the server

Hammered

1. Create a CLI for all the database operations so that someone using the package outside of Nails can interface with their database to run commands like createTable etc.
2. integrate more databases like mySQL, MongoDB etc.
3. Create proper testing for all the database methods and model methods

Usage

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If you would like to see it in action, please follow these steps:

1. clone the repo
2. run yarn or npm install (NOTE: it only works with Node v10 currently)
3. run npm link in the nails root directory (so you can run the commands globally)

Now you should (hopefully) be able to run the nails commands from terminal.

To generate an app.

1. cd into the directory where to want to generate the app
2. run nails create <project_name> from terminal (this will copy the application structure from Nails into your chose project name's directory) NOTE: I have added a flag that you can add after <project_name> to specify if you want to generate only the server or the client. e.eg nails create instagram --omit server this will omit the server. You can also pass in a database flag to specify the database you want to use. The default is Sqlite, the flag is => e.g. --db postgres
3. cd into server && client and run yarn to install the packages.
4. spin up the server with nodemon and the client with yarn start
5. Now that you have the application running you can see how when you create new models and migrate them, it updates the client dynamically using web sockets.

To scaffold a model

1. From the root directory of your project run nails g scaffold <model_name> <column_name>:<data_type> e.g. nails g scaffold posts title:text body:text (note: not all datatypes have properly been tested with the new Hammered ORM yet.)
2. run nails db migrate and the table will be created and relevant files will be copied form Nails into your project directory.

Other commands that are currently working

1. nails g model <model_name> <column_name>:<data_type>
2. nails g migration addColumnsTo<model_name> <column_name>:<data_type> e.g. nails g migration addColumnsToPosts likes:number
3. nails db rollback (rolls back 1 migration at a time)
4. nails db rollback step=n rolls back however many migrations determined by the steps you provide