In my many years of web development, I've come across a lot of good ways that platform authors did stuff, and a lot of bad ways. So I'm writing my version of a web platform on Node.js, and I decided to keep the good stuff, and get rid of what I didn't like. It wasn't easy but I'm pretty much finished by now.
As with most things I develop, I'll decide on an architecture that allows for changes to be made in a way that makes sense, but I'll start with what I want the code to look like. Yes. When I wrote my ORM, I started with the simple line, db.save(obj); (it turns out that's how you do it in MongoDB so I didn't have to write an ORM with Mongo :) When starting a web platform, I started out the same way.
I wanted to write:
<list value="${page.someListVariable}" var="item">
Details for ${item.name}
<include value="/template/item-template.html" item="item" />
</list>
Obvious features here are code and presentation separation, SSIs, simple variable replacement with ${} syntax.
There aren't a lot of tags in my platform. There's an if, which you can use to decide whether to output something. There's an include, which you can pass variables from the main page so you can reuse it on many pages. This one takes an "item" object, which it will refer to in its own code with ${item}.
Recently I added a layout concept. So you can have your layout html in another file, and just put things into the page in the page's actual html. For instance, you might reach the file index.html, which would look like this:
<layout name="main">
<content name="left-column">
<include value="/template/navigation.html" />
</content>
<content name="main-column">
<include value="/template/home-content.html" />
</content>
</layout>
Java Server Faces used a two way data binding mechanism which was really helpful. But then you need controls, like input[type=text] or whatever. My pages will not have two way data binding, but you can use plain html. Which I like better. (However, those controls were very simple to swap due to the generous use of interfaces by Java, and their documentation pretty much mandating their use. e.g. using ValueHolder in Java instead of TextBox, and if you were to make it a "select" or input[type=hidden], your Java code would not have to change, which is one thing I absolutely hate about ASP.NET).
I borrow nothing from PHP.
ASP.NET pretty much does nothing that I like, other than it's easy to keep track of what code gets run when you go to /default.aspx. The code in /default.aspx.cs and whatever Page class that inherits, or master page that it's on. In Java Server Faces you're scrounging through xml files to see which session bean got named "mybean".
My platform is similar to ASP.NET in that for /index.html there's a /site/pages/index.js (have I mentioned that it's built on node.js), that can optionally exist, and can have 1-2 functions implemented in it, which are "load" and "handlePost", if your page is so inclined to handle posts. Another option is to have this file exist, implement neither load nor handlePost, and just have properties in it. It's up to youme.
Here's a sample sitemap page for generating a Google Sitemap xml file:
Html:
<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?-->
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://${config.hostUrl}/index</loc>
<lastmod>2011-06-16</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<jsn:foreach value="${page.entries}" var="entry">
<url>
<loc>${entry.loc}</loc>
<lastmod>${entry.lastmod}</lastmod>
<changefreq>${entry.changefreq}</changefreq>
<priority>${entry.priority}</priority>
</url>
</jsn:foreach>
</urlset>
I use the jsn prefix, which just stands for (now, anyway) Javascript Node. I wasn't creative. I guess I can call it "Jason's Site N..." I can't think of an N.
And the javascript:
var date = require("dates"), common = require("../common");
this.entries = [];
this.load = function(site, query, finishedCallback){
var self = this;
var now = new Date(Date.now());
var yesterday = new Date(now.getFullYear(), now.getMonth(), now.getDate());
var yesterdayFormat = date.formatDate("YYYY-MM-dd", yesterday);
common.populateCities(site.db, function(states){
for (var i = 0; i < states.length; i++){
states[i].cities.forEach(function(city){
var entry = {
loc: "http://" + site.hostUrl + "/metro/" + city.state.toLowerCase() + "/" + city.key,
lastmod: yesterdayFormat,
changefreq: "daily",
priority: "1"
}
self.entries.push(entry);
});
}
finishedCallback({contentType: "text/xml"});
});
}
My finishedCallback function can take more parameters, say for handling a JSON request, I could add {contentType: "text/plain", content: JSON.stringify(obj)}.
That's about all there is to it! It's pretty easy to work with so far :) My site will launch soon!
