RailwayJS

http://railwayjs.com/

by olalonde • 14 years ago

99 49 14 years ago

railwayjs.com

nodesocket• 14 years ago

Nicely done. Appreciate the beautiful and detailed documentation.

rockyj4• 14 years ago

Wow! Mind = Blown! Thanks for doing this and giving it away for free.

16023• 14 years ago

You are welcome. Working on more mind-blown stuff for railway 2.0 right now.

olalonde2• 14 years ago

Hey, I'm currently evaluating a number of Node.js web frameworks for a project I'm working on (I'll eventually publish the results on my blog). So far, I have reviewed: RailwayJS, Locomotive[0], Tower.js[1], GeddyJS[2], Derby[3] and Meteor[4]. It would be really great if you could give me your opinion on how RailwayJS compares to those (especially Tower.js, GeddyJS and Locomotive as they seem to be competing directly).

[0] http://locomotivejs.org/

[1] http://towerjs.org/

[2] http://geddyjs.org/

[3] http://derbyjs.com/

[4] http://meteor.com/

... more Node.js web frameworks: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/modules#wiki-web-framewo...

kumar_navneet• 14 years ago

Nice work. Will increase adoption of nodejs within Rails community a lot more. Bookmarked, I would give this a spin coming weekend.

michael_miller• 14 years ago

Neat project! To echo what everyone else is saying, thanks for putting this out there.

I am curious as to what most HNers think of doing server side development in JS. It's obviously the flavor of the month, but I have yet to see the appeal. JS is certainly not a bad language, but it seems a lot more tedious than, say, ruby. The nesting of callbacks, the lack of built in OO infrastructure (given that most of us are trained with class based inheritance), the many quirks associated with making the language accessible to nonprogrammers. Am I missing something? Is there a really good reason to use JS on the server?

kenster072• 14 years ago

Nested callbacks naturally allows for non-blocking code, which leads to higher request capacity.

In, say, Ruby, you've got EventMachine for something equivalent but it's definitely "bolted" on to the language. Python has Twisted, with which I have no personal experience. In PHP, there are really no options.

jawngee• 14 years ago

If it's about higher request capacity, PHP scales horizontally with its share nothing, no application server architecture. I'm not advocating, just sayin'.

rockyj4• 14 years ago

The main reason Node.js is gaining popularity is because it is blazing fast, scales very well due to its IO + event driven architecture and it has the best support for websockets (see socket.io).

On the flip side, code can be hard to maintain and you need to be more disciplined so that you can read the code later otherwise it becomes a callback spaghetti. Doing everything through callbacks also requires a mental shift.

Like with everything in life, there are pros and cons and tradeoffs. So choose wisely :).

factorialboy3• 14 years ago

I'm sorry I don't buy JS code is hard to maintain analogy.

If you write modular and/or functional code, JS code bases can be just as easy / hard to maintain as any other language.

jaequery• 14 years ago

node.js isn't really that fast for traditional apps, but if you were to compare, it's pretty much on levels of nginx and it's actually slower serving static files. only in few cases node.js shows its power, i.e; real-time apps/games. i wouldn't build any full-blown websites in node.js. only a certain piece on the site i'd do it in node, like a widget or something.

federicoweber• 14 years ago

I can not get along with your statement about difficulties to maintain the code. How bad programming can be considered a fault of the language?

JPKab• 14 years ago

As silly as it sounds, one of my favorite aspects of Node is how ridiculously portable and modular it is. NPM makes everything a breeze, and (thanks to support from Microsoft) it actually allows easy development on Windows. I realize plenty of languages have their own package managers, but NPM is fantastic. The callback aspect definitely requires more discipline, but I'm glad that I've learned it.

factorialboy3• 14 years ago

Nested callbacks in JS means functions are first class members of the language.. ... thus ... Functional programming is possible in JS.. ... thus ... You can create beautiful abstractions with your code.

andybak• 14 years ago

First class functions != Functional programming language

imothee• 14 years ago

I use railway.js in production for a social bookmarking tool. I come from a rails background but a Rails API has some up and downs. I wanted to try node and have been very impressed. I use railway.js to serve up the iOS API (private beta) and the public beta website. It serves 800 reqs/min on a shared m1.small with one process and I've had no issues with it at all.

It plays a lot more smoothly with MongoDB and I find it far simpler to hook into more modern functionality with Websockets and client side JS rendering. I had a few issues with jugglingdb (which I forked and fixed) and it's all going smoothly.

I still use Rails for some sites but Node and railway.js let me bootstrap the whole API on MongoDB in a few days and get very acceptable performance.

davidw3• 14 years ago

I think the sweet spot for this kind of thing is when doing websockets. For a "normal" site, Rails is fine; it does a ton out of the box, and I like the language more than Javascript. However, the websocket story with Rails is not as clear as with something like Node, Erlang, or Go. This is worth repeating:

http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/08/debunking-nodejs-gis...

gnufied3• 14 years ago

May be not as much clear. But Ruby world has plenty of options for Websocket as well. I have built production Websocket server on top of Goliath and Faye and it works like a charm.

https://github.com/faye/faye-websocket-ruby

Faye is the the most feature complete websocket implementation out there and it works quite well.

nwienert• 14 years ago

This seems very similar to Rails in structure and features, with the obvious upsides and downsides of Javascript and Node brought along. For me, the first Node framework to really catch my eye was Meteor. The live-updating, hot-code-pushing features seemed to really take advantage of the speed of V8, but I was put off by the total lack of MVC structure and other niceties of Rails (that are in Railway).

I'm still on the fence with Node and have yet to give it a real try. I think what will finally get me to jump in is something between the two. The sensibilities and structure of Rails with the great realtime features in Meteor. Just sayin.

EDIT: This does look fantastic by the way, a great contribution to the community.

stuffihavemade• 14 years ago

Take a look at Derby (which is similar to Meteor) as well (http://derbyjs.com/).

davedx• 14 years ago

There's a glaring typo: "try in you browser"

16023• 14 years ago

LOL. Fixed :)

narendranag• 14 years ago

Mind = Blown.

jameswyse2• 14 years ago

RailwayJS is cool, I used it for a long time, though I now use Locomotive as the latest git version is very good. It doesn't offer as many features but is clean and gets out your way.

johnx123-up2• 14 years ago

Please give little more information why http://locomotivejs.org/ is better than RailwayJS. Very much interested to know the reasons.

jameswyse2• 14 years ago

I like locomotive because it stays out my way and allows me to work the way I want to. It's basically just Express 3 with an MVC layout, nicer routing, some nice helpers and a very clean and logical directory layout. It's how I would organise a new Express application if I was coding it from scratch!

I really like the idea of locomotive's 'initializers' directory - Any files you put in here are loaded at boot, in order. I use files in here to set up things like configuration, databases, logging, etc. With railwayjs these all ended up in the environment files which was hard to maintain.

The one thing I really didn't like in RailwayJS was the convention of putting all your database models inside one file (schema.js), I had to over-ride the built in ORM (JugglingDB) at the time because it was lacking features and define a customSchema() function to use mongoose, and this file ended up being really large and a bit of a mess. I tried separating things in to individual model files but I couldn't get it working without messing with RailwayJS code.

Probably a lot of the problems I had are now resolved as this was a few months ago, but I'm sticking with Locomotive from now on :)

wamatt2• 14 years ago

RailwayJS looks interesting, but wondering why they don't appear to support pushState routing with # fallback, out the box.

hashbangs URLs are so 2010. :p

zafriedman• 14 years ago

First off, let me state that I in no way wish to diminish the accomplishments of the authors of RailwayJS in making these comments. I think they've built an inevitable framework given that Rails was (and likely still is) the most popular open source web framework (at least as far as the HN/startup crowd goes) and of course why not give developers the same abstractions they have with their old favorite when a new thing comes along. But here's a constructive observation:

Node.js isn't a framework. AND it's not a programming language. Node is ostensibly a set of libraries and a runtime environment. I've been to a few Node meetups over the past few years, and inevitably people (not just newbies btw) will ask "what will be the Rails for Node?" But I think making this analogy is wrong. It's wrong for two main reasons, the first of which is that it implicitly compares Node.js to Ruby, which is a category mistake. More importantly though I'd argue, it's wrong because making the Rails for Node analogy deprives the developer (you!) of the opportunity to allow an emergent programming paradigm to change the way you think about programming! So how should Node do that? My fantasy for how Node.js will evolve in the next few years is that it will be a series of node packages which can be easily dropped in and out of my programs. I believe that the goal of the third-party node package development community should be to encourage this modularity, because I think it is the right abstraction for what Node.js actually is, and not necessarily what some people might wish it was. It's easy enough to set up EventMachine in Rails and then you can use your familiar stack, but I'd encourage anyone looking to use Node.js to fully embrace it and use it as an opportunity to explore new workflows, and not just try to fit your old stack into an event loop.

taude2• 14 years ago

Serious question: what's the point of all these Node.JS frameworks trying to mimic existing web framework functionality? Once you start adding synchronous database access, don't you lose more of the advantages of NodeJS anyway? Seems like all these frameworks appearing are trying to solve a problem already solved.

taude2• 14 years ago

I've read some of the comments below and it seems there's some form of consensus that Node shines for the websocket.io portion of the web stack. So likely real use cases for NodeJS will using it in conjunction with your regular website?

derdesign• 14 years ago

Protos is awesome... http://derdesign.github.com/protos/

RailwayJS

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