Apis and node

Convener

Brian Mulloy (@landlessness)

Attendees

Kevin Swiber, Matt Dobson, Kris Kleva, Tony Tahmouch, Mitch Oliver, Adam Gainsley, Andreas Schmidt, Rob Raux, ...

Notes

Expectations

• How to go from play to deploying?
• How to sell node internally to the enterprise?
• How are projects going for others?
• What are the pains using node for APIs?

Analysis of Node for APIs

Pros

• easy to build
• smaller footprint than JVM (~12MB)
• solid support on MS Azure
• can move server work to JavaScript developers
• async model is powerful
• Oracle supports it (node.jar)
• Chrome profiler

Cons

• hard to find right libraries
• still rev'ing quickly, hard to figure out impacts of change
• async model is a challenge for some developers
• debugging (especially in production) can be hard
• Google (v8 engine) is typically not an enterprise standard

Popular Frameworks

• Express (3 people with experience building APIs)
• Restify (1)
• Argo (1)
• HAPI (0)
• API Axle (0)

Framework Analysis

Express

Pros

• Well documented
• Small code base
• modular
• DIY approach
• Stable
• Strong community adoption
  • leaders are open about shortcomings
• performance is good
• all-in-one web UI and web APIs
• Part of MEAN stack: Mango, Express, Angular, Node

Cons

• focus is UI (not API)
• response object is not a first class citizen
• no pipeline metaphor

Argo

Pros

• built around pipeline metaphor
• NPM packages for:
  • rate limiting
  • compression
  • OAuth
  • caching
• tight knot community
• fast bug fixes
• Proxy is a first-class feature

Cons

• new
• buggy still
• small community
• no support for regular expression routes (conscious design trade-off for performance)

Restify

Pros

• rapid development
• no UI stuff to distract from API focus
• NPM packages:
  • XML to JSON
  • Rate Limiting
  • OAuth
• dnode
• routes have versions

Cons

• smallish community
• no response pipeline

HAPI

Pros

• Created by Eran Hammer (OAuth dude, Walmart Labs)
• Good tooling

Cons

• Config vs Code
• Slow
• Code does not follow .js or node conventions

API Axle

Pros

• generates proxies quickly
• redis works out of the box
• key management
• proxy approach
• API management focus
• commercial support

Cons

• small community
• not an API server (focus is proxy)

Additional Resources

• The Plight of Pinocchio: JavaScript’s quest to become a real language - Brandon Keepers