Show HN: Remult – a CRUD framework for full-stack TypeScript

by yonirapoport • 4 years ago

130 52 4 years ago

metadat• 4 years ago

This looks really nice. Are there any other competing frameworks in the TS space? Would be curious to hear about folks' experiences.

iampims• 4 years ago

ChiselStrike

xcambar• 4 years ago

I use Nest as my TS backend framework of choice.

It just works great, covers just every use case I throw at it (business apps or side projects), has the right balance of versatility and openness, and doesn't try to do more than backend.

I really love it.

js4ever• 4 years ago

I hated Nest, you have to learn their "magic", it was continuously in my way instead of helping me

waspight2• 4 years ago

I totaly agree. Have used it for years and still does.

chipgap98• 4 years ago

I feel like this would effectively be an alternative to Blitz.js or tRPC

tomcam• 4 years ago

Very well thought out. Demo at

https://remult-crm-demo.herokuapp.com/

Username: Velva

Password: password

Front end of the demo is functional but a little rough on my iPhone with Safari.

d4a• 4 years ago

It seems to already be filled with racial slurs unfortunately.

Also, pressing enter to log in doesn't work.

MuffinFlavored• 4 years ago

Bundle some Dockerfile/docker-compose.yml/k8s yaml/k8s Helm charts/Terraform examples maybe?

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/a...

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-button

yonirapoport3• 4 years ago

Good idea. Thanks!

matthewfcarlson• 4 years ago

I love the idea of this. I’ve written something in the same vein but it’s a websocket transport and it has a shared vuex store. So basically mutations are sent across the wire and it has logic for dealing with conflicts.

jadbox• 4 years ago

Similar, one of my fav TypeScript CRUD tools is TSOA. It generates OpenAPI specs from regular type information on functions. https://tsoa-community.github.io/docs/introduction.html

smt88• 4 years ago

Unfortunately like almost all Node libraries, it isn't very mature or well-maintained. I stopped using it because it was too rigid and missing vital features.

hardwaresofton• 4 years ago

Could you expand on which features you found were missing?

I use tsoa and am happy with it but often choose NestJS these days as it’s much more structured.

darepublic3• 4 years ago

I may try this out since I am handrolling something similar for a project but I am strapped for time. Only thing is I am generating types from an openapi spec and sharing the types with ui as a dependency. I somewhat prefer that approach as I end up with an openapi spec and I don't need any framework whatsoever beyond perhaps a dev dependency on type generation from openapi doc

goodoldneon2• 4 years ago

What are you using to codegen the types?

darepublic3• 4 years ago

I haven't done it yet. I've just set up a monorepo and prototyped sharing of types from backend to frontend. Googling it seemed like there were some decent options for type generation from swagger, i.e. https://github.com/drwpow/openapi-typescript

nawgz2• 4 years ago

I like to use Hasura to give me full GraphQL access to a PostgreSQL/MSSQL database and then I can use graphql-codegen to get real, schema-based frontend types with no need for more tools than Hasura and graphql-codegen. Not sure that'll help you here but it's a thought.

I will note the MSSQL version of Hasura seems to be slightly behind in documentation, not sure about features though

darepublic3• 4 years ago

unfortunately I am in the anti-graphql camp

imachine1980_• 4 years ago

what is the advantage over next.js-typescript?

yonirapoport3• 4 years ago

It should be an addition to next.js not a replacement. It adds the CRUD capabilities, strong typing, entity code sharing…

latchkey• 4 years ago

I'd prefer if they wrapped https://mikro-orm.io/ instead of inventing their own.

moltar2• 4 years ago

Decorators are tiring.

dfee• 4 years ago

I’m distrustful of them. I’m not sure what version will be approved and what version has been ruled out, invalidating some swath of libraries.

Can anyone provide a succinct summary?

johnhenry• 4 years ago

There is an implementation proposal [0] is at stage 3[1], which means it's likely to land. Unfortunately, there is no set timeline.

- [0] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-decorators - [1] https://tc39.es/process-document/

moltar2• 4 years ago

Another alternative is tRPC.

etnichols2• 4 years ago

How does this differ from Prisma? https://www.prisma.io/.

I do like the quick bootstrapping Remult offers via "JSON db" if one hasn't set up a DB yet. And entity classes defined as a .ts file is nice, as opposed to Prisma's DSL (e.g. schema.prisma file).

redox99• 4 years ago

Seems pretty different. Prisma is an ORM basically, while this generates HTTP REST endpoints for you.

yonirapoport3• 4 years ago

Prisma focuses on backend<->db while Remult also handles frontend<->backend

etnichols2• 4 years ago

I see. Prisma does generate a FE client though (PrismaClient) that essentially can be dropped into NextJS API routes (or, more directly, used in the getServerSideProps method on a next js page). Thus its fairly integrated across the stack. (Not trying to jack this thread to peddle Prisma, just a longtime user of it and trying to find similarities).

It does seem feasible one could use Remult + Prisma + NextJS, with Prisma as Source of Truth of DB schema and Remult Source of Truth for Client side data model (although, that might go against the "define once, use anywhere" pattern laid out here).

Really like the project though, great docs and tutorial.

robocat2• 4 years ago

Hmmm, exceptions in validation! Debugger hell.

  export class Product {
    @Fields.string<Product>({
        validate: product => {
            if (product.name.trim().length == 0)
                throw 'required';
        }
    })
    name = '';

gabereiser• 4 years ago

I see this a lot with Java style validations. Everything is an exception or can be one. Try catch hell everywhere and there are two schools of thought. Let the exceptions bubble up. Or catch the exceptions you expect at the abstraction, letting the rest bubble up.

smrtinsert• 4 years ago

Well that's weird since java validation frameworks usually collect validation failures before throwing.

robocat2• 4 years ago

Exceptions are imperative, but validation should be declarative (only requires pure functions to work out validation state given stateful input parameters).

Exceptions are a really bad match for marking validation (even ignoring the arsefest that is debugging exceptions during keyboard input events - ugggh).

The DOM has onInvalid events[1] that are fired on form submit (not blur), and there is an :invalid[2] pseudo class for highlighting input errors. Not a perfect API, but certainly relevantly interesting.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLInputEl...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:invalid

hparadiz• 4 years ago

This can work if the controller uses a try catch and handles the exception properly passing the error up the chain to an error output from the rest controller.

Personally I hold the errors in an array which is useful when validating a form when you want to show multiple errors from a save attempt.

However I do throw an exception if the model is somehow incorrectly configured. Like a validator method being expected but not defined.

EarthLaunch2• 4 years ago

I was stumped on how to integrate Postgres schemas + TypeScript types, so I visited HN, and this thread helped me move forward.

My project is a game, the client/server uses WebSocket rather than a normal REST API.

I have used Prisma, Knex, TypeORM. Seems to me that ideally, we would write types in TypeScript and have a DB schema generated from those, including automatic migrations based on schema diffing like Prisma. Then we only need to know TS, not another DSL.

We don't want to generate TS types from the DB because then we have no way of versioning the DB schema (except by writing SQL or DSL migrations).

I ended up finding https://deepkit.io/library/orm and I'm going to try it out. (Not associated with project)

johnny22• 4 years ago

are you familiar with mikro-orm ?

EarthLaunch2• 4 years ago

Thank you for mentioning it, that made me take a re-look. I find the schema generator doc[0] hard to digest. But I do like that it uses the 'do one thing well' philosophy. Deepkit allows using just the ORM package, but I appreciate how detailed the warnings are on the mikroorm doc.

0: https://mikro-orm.io/docs/schema-generator

livshitz• 4 years ago

Very impressive, a star well deserved

Show HN: Remult – a CRUD framework for full-stack TypeScript

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