nodejam

What's Fora

A platform for building end-to-end Isomorphic JS apps.

Fora builds on the significance of every shipping browser also including a debugging and dev environment for JavaScript. Which means that if the stack is entirely JavaScript, you could develop/test in a browser and expect it to run with Node.JS on the Server.

• Fora is an Build System (and an App Store and IDE which are external tools not part of this repo) for "End-to-End Isomorphic" JS Apps.
• End-to-End Isomorphism? We've gotten the Web Server, App and the Db API (MongoDb initially) to run entirely within the browser
• The App Store will feature (eventually) apps in various categories, like Publishing, Social Service, Travel ...
• Most Apps in the App Store will be Open Source, but there'll be an Enterprise Version
• Any user can Fork, Edit and Debug an existing app within just the browser (we've an IDE, based on http://ace.c9.io/)
• You can set breakpoints for Business Logic and Db inside the browser (since Fora's Mongo API runs in the browser)
• Once they make a worthwhile change, they may also send pull requests to the original maintainer
• These apps can also be provisioned and deployed on a Server (which will be a paid service)
• We'll see what we can do with React Native to enable Mobile Apps
• In Phase 2, we'll support all compile to JS languages (like Java, Python, LISP, Dart etc)

The platform preview is ready, but at this point we're working on docs and examples.

• We were planning to do this by June 1st week, but it might take a month more. Apologies.
• We will also be switching the licenses for all Fora Projects from GPL3 to MIT.

If you're adventurous:

npm install -g fora
fora install fora-template-blog
fora new blog somedir
cd somedir
fora build

Most of the development & testing has been with io.js, so we recommend using io.js.

The example appstore template is an empty template right now.