kana.js

Why

kana.js helps you to build a clean, elegant RESTful API without effort.
It encourages developers to use ES2015 Promise / Generator style easily which is really nice to manage asynchronous control flow with robust error handling. It's intended to be used on top of Express.js which is mainstream framework for building a node.js application, that means you can use bunch of libraries and middlewares freely.

Let me show you a very simple example code using kana.js.

'use strict';

const User = require('../models/User');
const NotFound = require('kana/lib/exception').NotFound;

module.exports = {
  show: function* (params) {
    let user = yield User.findById(params.userId);
    if (!user) throw new NotFound('User Not Found');
    return { result: user.toJSON() };
  }
};

See? It's incredibly simple to build a RESTful API without any callback hell nor error handling code.
`kana.js` abstracts all these for you so that you can focus on writing real code.
The equivalent code of standard [Express.js] style is like below.

module.exports = {
  show: function (req, res) {
    User.findById(req.params.userId, (err, user) => {
      if (err) {
        return res.status(500).send();
      }
      if (!user) {
        return res.status(404).send({ message: 'User Not Found' });
      }
      res.send({ result: user.toJSON() });
    });
  }
};

So much things to take care of!!

Get Started

You can install `kana.js` with simple command. ```bash $ npm install kana ```

1. Define routes

You can define routes on config file which is almost same to Sails.js.

// config/routes.js

module.exports = {
  'get /user': 'UserController.index',
  'get /user/:userId': 'UserController.show',
  'post /user': 'UserController.create',
  'delete /user': 'UserController.remove'
};

Quite straightforward.

2. Bind routes

On your main.js script,

'use strict';

const app = require('express')();
const Router = require('kana').Router;

app.use(require('body-parser').json())
Router.bindRoute(app);

let server = app.listen(3000, () => {
  let host = server.address().address;
  let port = server.address().port;
  console.log('Example app listening at http://%s:%s', host, port);
});

By calling Router.bindRoute method, you can bind all routes defined in config file.

3. Define Default Error Handler

Just same as Express.js, you can define a default error handling middleware at last.

'use strict';

const app = require('express')();
const Router = require('kana').Router;
const Exception = require('kana/lib/exception').Exception;

app.use(require('body-parser').json())
Router.bindRoute(app);

app.use((err, req, res, next) => {
  if (!err) return next();
  if (err instanceof Exception) {
    res.status(err.status).send(err);
  } else {
    console.log(err.stack);
    res.status(500).send();
  }
});

4. Write Controller

You must locate controller file under app/controllers/ directory. For instance,

// app/controllers/UserController.js

'use strict';

const NotFound = require('kana/lib/exception').NotFound;
const User = require('../models/User');

module.exports = {
  index: function* () {
    let users = yield User.find();
    return { result: users.map(_ => _.toJSON()) };
  },

  show: function* (params) {
    let user = yield User.findById(params.userId);
    if (!user) throw new NotFound('User Not Found');
    return { result: user.toJSON() };
  },

  create: function* (params) {
    let user = yield User.create(params);
    return { result: user.toJSON() };
  }
};

Each action is a generator function which takes params argument and returns Promise.
You can find all neccessary data from params argument which has request body, route parameters, query strings.
If you need raw access to Express.js request / response object, you can find it in this context like this.req, this.res.
For ORM, kana.js doesn't restrict you to choose specific ORM framework.
You can choose whatever you want as long as it supports Promise interface.

5. Throw Exception

kana.js supports basic exceptions like BadRequest, NotFound, Forbidden, InternalError.
They all inherits parent class Exception.
So you can basically define any custom exception class like below.

const Exception = require('kana/lib/exception').Exception;

class CustomException extends Exception {
  constructor(msg) {
    super(msg);
    this.status = 777;
  }
}

module.exports = CustomException;

And that's it. Enjoy your programming!