relay.ts

Serve RESTFul APIs quickly and simply

What?

This project is an abstraction over the builtin HTTP(s) module in Node. It aims to emulate the Express.js API, whilst being very performant and almost entirely dependency free.

Currently, this library is in very early stages and used more as a learning experience.

How does this differ from Express?

Express is based on Connect, which has the simple concept of: all middleware goes on a central stack. The stack of middleware is traversed and checking verb/url.

In relay, the .init() method organises middle in to different stacks, accessed via an object with the URL as a key. Each URL sits under each verb, which is the key, too:

this.middlewares = {
  'GET': {
    '/': [Middleware, Middleware],
    '/api': [Middleware, Middleware],
    '*': [Middleware]
  },
  'POST': {
    '/api': [Middleware]
  }
}

As you can guess, middleware lookup is O(1), not O(N) worst case. PERF

Usage

Once this is published on npm, install it!

yarn add ${libname}

Then, create a server!

import path from 'path';
import relay, { useStatic } from 'relay';

const server: Server = relay.createServer({ port: 8080 });

// you can use HTTP verbs, and use - just like express!
server.get('/', (req, res) => {
  res.send('hello, world');
});

// static file hosting built in:
server.get(useStatic(path.join(__dirname, 'static')));

// you can also chain!
server.get('/baz', (req, res, next) => {
  delete req._req;
  res.json(req);
})
.post('/', (req, res) => {
  res.send('oi')
});

// make sure to call .init, to create the server!
server.init().then(() => console.log('listening on 8080'));

Roadmap:

• [x] Body parsing (form, json, urlencoded)
• [x] HTTP Verbs support
• [x] query param parsing
• [x] next() (very fucking difficult)
• [ ] cookie parsing (sort of works)
• [x] use middleware
• [x] Static files
• [ ] Compression (gzip + ???)