Node.js Rest Framework

Question

I plan to write a rather large-scale web application using JavaScript. I believe I will be developing the webapp using CanJS to organize my client-side pieces.

I am strongly considering using Node.js for my server-side component, but I was wondering what the best way to set up Node to accept and handle REST requests. I did some Googling and came across something called Express. Any comments on this?

Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Negrillo

Answer 1

restify is a node.js module built specifically to enable you to build correct REST web services.

http://mcavage.github.com/node-restify/

Express is more directed towards full web application (rendering HTML, etc). Restify is just for web services.

Besides, the guy who created Restify works at Joyent, the company where Ryan Dahl developped Node.js (which is kind of guarantee quality).

Tyrannize

I like to consider full web application the same thing as web services. I'm using restify for full web application. I implemented an HTML and XML formatter to handle different representations. So it's all good. +1 for restify. – Honeywell

Answer 2

For REST request handling, express-resource is a more focused solution than railwayjs that's also built on top of expressjs.

Clitoris

Answer 3

You can try http://railwayjs.com/ it is build on top of http://expressjs.com/

Express is nice and fast :) railway has similar stack to ruby on rails.

Widescreen

Answer 4

http://expressjs.com is the de factor standard, does Sinatra-like routing. If you want real easy automatic generation of resources (sort of Rails-style), try one of those libraries above.

If you want it real simple on top of express, try http://github.com/deitch/booster

Disclosure: I just released Booster this week.

Shackelford