NRAF is an abbreviation, for "Not Really A Framework". I don't remember why I named it that in 2018, it's been a while, but I kinda like the sound of it, so the name stayed.
I worked on it for a while and then sort of drifted away from it, but now I am picking it up again and will try to work on it more.
NRAF is a lightweight library(/framework), which allows you to build web applications.
NRAF is written from scratch, which means it uses ZERO npm dependencies. Why do I even mention that ? because this is one of the key reason, why I actually started working on it.
The NodeJS ecosystem has a problem of developers relying on external dependencies, a little too much. This has a lot of issues, including serious security issues(which we have already seen a few times in past).
And thus NRAF doesn't using any external dependencies and everything is built from scratch.
You can start by going through the Quick Start Guide, which will get you up and running quickly and also teach you most of the basics about NRAF.
All the links are mentioned below.
When I initially started working on NRAF, I frequenly looked at the ExpressJS source code for inspiration of possible ways of implementing a feature.
Also, before that I had also consumed ExpressJS in a few projects, I built and I really like the API it exposed.
Courtesy of all those factors, NRAF now looks a lot like Express, let look at an example.
Here are a few endpoints I built
const PORT = 3000;
const USERS = [
{
id: "1",
name: "John Doe",
},
{
id: "2",
name: "Foo Bar",
},
];
app.get("/users", (req, res) => {
res.json(USERS);
});
app.get("/user/:userId", (req, res) => {
const userId = req.params.userId;
const user = USERS.find((user) => {
return user.id === userId;
});
if (user) {
res.json(user);
} else {
res.setStatus(401);
res.json({
message: "Error, no user found",
});
}
});
app.listen(PORT, () => {
console.log("Server is running on PORT: ", PORT);
});If you show this code to anyone who has worked with express, for even a amount of time, they would instantly recognied what's happening and tell you this is valid express code.
While that is true in part, this code is missing two key lines.
const express = require("express");
const app = express();what this piece of code does is, it imports the express package and initializes it for you to use.
But, what's interesting here is, the above code is also valid NRAF code, all you need to do is, change the imports.
const NRAF = require("nraf");
const app = NRAF();and this works, right out of the box.
This means that, some amount of express code can directly be ported to NRAF, just by changing the imports.
You can play with the Todo App example, using node example/Todo/index.js.
The examples folder contains files, which are labelled, so you can quickly look specific application examples which you might be interest in.
