About

(Will evolve into an express-* umbrella framework)

Application kikstart for Express + Mongoose in CoffeeScript with a thin sintactic sugar layer and minimal structure.
Makes writing small-ish Express apps in CoffeeScript a little better.

Highlights

• Controller objects that you can use as MVC or plain Express routes callbacks
• niceties to make code less verbose, less typing, cleaner code
• nice MVC structure inspired by Rails
• flexible conventions
• base application skeleton
• CoffeeScript all the way down (CSON for language translations, CoffeeKup for views)

Examples

Routing example

# app/routes.coffee
module.exports = ->

  # Can use function callbacks that run inside of a controller context
  @get '/', to: ->
    @title = "Hello route function!"
    @render 'index'

  # Can use controller actions callbacks
  @get '/tweets', to: 'tweets#index'
  @post '/tweets', to: {controller: 'tweets', action: 'create'}

  # Namespaces
  @namespace '/admin', ->
    # Can use REST routing via express-resource
    @resource 'users'

    @get '/test', to: ->
      @title = "Hello namespace!"
      @render 'index'

Controller example

# app/controllers/tweets.coffee
Controller = require 'sugar_cube/controller'
Tweet = require 'models/tweet'


class Tweets extends Controller

  @action index: ->
    Tweet.find (@err, @tweets) => @render 'tweets/index'

  @action create: ->
    @tweet = new Tweet @param 'tweet'
    @tweet.save (@err) => @redirect 'back'


module.exports = Tweets

Views example

# views/index.coffee
h1 -> @title

# views/tweets/index.coffee
h1 -> 'Express'

for tweet in @tweets
  p -> tweet.body

form action: "/tweet", method: "post", ->
  input type: "text", name: "tweet[body]"
  input type: "submit"

Look at the code in the lib/ folder to see the code making these posible, it's nicely documented.

Code reload

1. Via cluster reload

• coffee cluster.coffee (see cluster.coffee file)

2. Via node-supervisor

• install sudo npm install supervisor -g
• run with supervisor app.coffee

Debug

See node-inspector

coffee --nodejs --debug app.coffee

File structure

app/
  client/ - client specific modules (via browserify)
    entry.coffee - client main (see browserify)
    ...
  controllers/ - controller files
    users.coffee
    sessions.coffee
    ...
  locales/ - I18n CSON files (or JSON)
    en.cson
    es.cson
    ...
  models/ - Mongoose models
    user.coffee
    post.coffee
    ...
  views/ - CoffeeKup view files
    layouts/ - layout files
      application.coffee - default layout
    users/
      index.coffee
      new.coffee
      ...
  config.coffee - environment configuration, middleware, database connection
  helpers.coffee - view helpers here
  routes.coffee - routes definitions
lib/ - library code
app.coffee - server boot and configuration
cluster.coffee - cluster support

Coming soon

• Scaffolding
• logging with winston https://github.com/indexzero/winston