Overview

Thanks for checking out redoak! The aim of this project is to allow rapid prototyping of HTML without getting in the way of your usual toolchain. There are no manifestos or revolutions, just faster development.

This tool currently provides:

• A server that serves up HTML that refreshes itself when it or any of its dependencies change.
• A method of creating widgets, which are basically HTML snippets and coupling it with some script logic The widgets can be rendered server side or client side.
• A mixin system that allows widgets to take on multiple features.
• A straightforward way to split up components and test them with mock data.

Anti-goals:

• This project will never be a comprehensive toolkit. You are encouraged to use jQuery, backbone, underscore.js, whatever with redoak! It should be possible to use this with non-node projects: django, tornado, rails, and so forth.
• No database model middleware.
• Live updating of client code on your production server. The websocket connection is for development purposes only.

This project is brang new and is still evolving rapidly. Please give it a try and file lots of bugs! Patches are appreciated as well.

Diving in

The best way to get the gist of it is to try it. After you install redoak, just run:

bin/redoak public/todo.html

Navigate to http://localhost:3000/, fire up your favorite editor and start playing. :) You can add files to public/, and they should be visible to the webserver.

Understanding the code

Check out lib/dependencies.js. It's responsible for parsing the HTML, picking out any CSS links or script tags, and watching them all for any changes. The other important file is lib/render.js. It processes the tree, and generates widget code and the final HTML.

Testing

There's one test. :) Try it:

node lib/reftest/reftest.js

It diffs the output of a sample oak file with the expected HTML. If nothing is outputted, congratulations, it passed!

Using it in your web app

Unless you want to contribute, I wouldn't recommend using it in anything serious. Little thought has been given to browser compatibility or how to incorporate it into a larger scope project. Optimization should be pretty straightforward, but that work hasn't been done yet.

If that didn't scare you, here's how I'm doing it so far: I just require redoak and use the express middleware with some static handlers for dependencies. For session-specific data or DB model data, I've been including a separate JS file so that everything else can stay static and cached. If you write a tag whose src starts with a / like:

<script src='/session.js'></script>

Then redoak will ignore it. There should probably be a way to render widgets from your DB on the server, eventually.