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Fuxx: Build APIs and simple web applications in ArangoDB

WARNING: The following documentation file is pure fiction, it is not yet finished

An application build with Fuxx is written in JavaScript and deployed to ArangoDB directly. ArangoDB serves this application, you do not need a separate application server.

So given you want to build an application that sends a plain-text response "Worked!" for all requests to /my/way. How would you achieve that with Fuxx?

First, create a directory my_app and save a file called app.js in this directory. Write the following content to this file:

Frank = require("org/arangodb/frank");

app = new Frank();

app.get('/way', function(req, res) {
  res.set("Content-Type", "text/plain");
  res.body = "Worked!"
});

app.start();

This is your application. Now we need to mount it to the path /my. In order to achieve that, we create a file called manifest.json in our my_app directory with the following content:

{
  'apps': {
    '/my': 'app.js'
  }
}

Now your application is done. Start ArangoDB as follows:

arangod --app my_app /tmp/fancy_db

Now point your browser to /my/way and you should see "Worked!". After this short overview, let's get into the details

Frank Syntax

You find this somewhere completely different. Sorry.

Manifest Files

When you start arangod with the --app option, ArangoDB scans the given directory on every request for files called manifest.json. There can be multiple files in the root directory and all direct subdirectories if you want that. The content is a JSON object with two keys: apps and libs. (we will also add a third one called vendor for NPM packages, but this does not exist yet). apps is an object that matches routes to files:

The key is the route you want to mount at
The value is the path to the JavaScript file containing the Franks you want to mount

You can add multiple applications in one manifest in this way.

In addition you can add an optional libs String. This is a path to a folder containing multiple JavaScript files which define CommonJS modules that you want to use in your Fuxx apps. They will all be loaded, so you can require them as usual. The lib folder can be structured however you want. If you have a folder models in your lib folder containing a file user.js, you can require it with user = require('models/user').

A more complete example for a Manifest file:

{
  'apps': {
    '/blog': 'apps/blog.js',
    '/shop': 'apps/shop.js'
  },

  'lib': 'lib'
}

Development Mode

If you start the application in the way described above, you are working in development mode. This means that on every request:

All routes are dropped
All module caches are flushed
Your app directory is scanned for manifest files, and each manifest file is read
All files in your lib folder(s) are loaded
All apps are executed. Each app.start() will put the routes in a temporary route object, prefixed with the path given in the manifest
All routes in the temporary route object are stored to the routes
The request will be processed

This means that you do not have to restart ArangoDB if you change anything in your app (This will change when we add support for vendor, they will not be reloaded). It is of course not meant for production, because the reloading makes the app relatively slow.

Deploying on Production

If you are comfortable to deploy your app to your production ArangoDB, you will have to do the following:

Not yet decided

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