flora

Flora

Flora is a FLexible Open Rest API framework for node.js.

+++ still under development - first alpha version is planned for Q3/Q4 2015 +++

Features

• Resources in resources (recursive) - fetch as much as possible in one request, without duplicating code
• Lightweight (but powerful) field/sub-resource selection syntax - fetch exactly what you need in one request
• Filter resources even by sub-resource-attributes - resolve inside database when possible, else feeding ID-lists
• Pluggable DataSources - currently implemented: MySQL, Solr/Lucene (TODO: separate npm-packages for them?)
• Combine multiple DataSources - even on per-row-basis - "API-side-JOIN"
• Highly optimized database querys - internal SQL parser to remove unselected fields and thus unreferenced LEFT JOINs
• Locale: Parameterize JOINs i.e. with a localeId - no need for database views which can't be parameterized
• Handle all your special cases as good as possible - callbacks for "everything"

Server-Features

• Node.js HTTP-Server and Cluster based implementation with self-monitoring process-management
• Extremely verbose server-status - see everytime what the server is doing and what is hanging around in production
• Straightforward logging/error handling - i.e. forward all errors to your favorite "error-monitoring-tool"
• Updates in production with zero downtime - almost every part of code and config is replaceable without shutdown
• Comfortable development-features - usual "code-change - F5 - see result"-workflow

Design Goals

• Generic implementation just for reading - offer helper for writing
• Easy abstraction of complex and distributed database structures
• Easy standard cases with minimal boilerplate code - special cases possible - "everywhere"
• Flexibility, stability, performance, simplicity, transparency

Examples

URL-Structure

Format:

/path/to/resource/id.format?do=action&select=xxx&filter=xxx&limit=10&page=1&width=100&height=100

Examples:

• GET /article/123 (retrieve article 123 as JSON)
• GET /article/ (list of all articles)

Resource-Implementation

module.exports = {
    // TODO
};

Abstract definition

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<resource>
    <!-- TODO -->
</resource>

License

MIT