How would you guys feel about switching from Express to Sails? It's built on Express but with modeling as well. I need to look into it more, but just putting it out there.
2015-03-12 07104, 2015
bookzombie
[bookbrainz-site] LordSputnik pushed 2 new commits to master: http://git.io/p6LK
2015-03-12 07105, 2015
bookzombie
bookbrainz-site/master e156e0e Ben Ockmore: Fixed errors in relationship editor caused by missing ko field, and copy/pasted code from another form.
2015-03-12 07154, 2015
Leftmost
Hmm. We could just pull in Waterline from Sails.
2015-03-12 07124, 2015
Freso
I think we should just go with Oars.
2015-03-12 07155, 2015
Ben|Nexus joined the channel
2015-03-12 07137, 2015
Ben|Nexus
Leftmost: yes let's switch to sails
2015-03-12 07158, 2015
Ben|Nexus
It looks like it does lots of things right, and we'll be better in the long run
2015-03-12 07155, 2015
Ben|Nexus
We'll want to swap in gulp for grunt though - let's talk more about switching at the meeting
LordSputnik, oh dear. I am sad to hear that he has died.
2015-03-12 07124, 2015
Freso
I wouldn't be against him as the first row in the database, as a tribute.
2015-03-12 07136, 2015
Freso
(Well, I'm just assuming it's Pratchett.)
2015-03-12 07124, 2015
Leftmost
Freso, we'll be holding a vote for that, but such tributes are perfectly valid reasons for nomination. :)
2015-03-12 07147, 2015
Leftmost
LordSputnik, do you know enough about sails to know what it brings above express + waterline?
2015-03-12 07148, 2015
Freso
I know you will.
2015-03-12 07124, 2015
Leo_Verto
I don't really have that much node experience, but I'm kinda feeling like this dependency stuff is getting kinda overboard, we recently switched to gulp and now going back to grunt is being talked about. Now throwing express overboard and going with something else is being discussed again...
2015-03-12 07127, 2015
LordSputnik
Leo_Verto: no, the point I was making earlier is we'll need to tweak Sails to use gulp
2015-03-12 07149, 2015
LordSputnik
But Sails is pretty good, it can handle all of the front end compilation when we launch it
2015-03-12 07100, 2015
LordSputnik
It also uses express, so all of our code will require very little modification
2015-03-12 07156, 2015
LordSputnik
From the test I did earlier, it seems to be fairly easy to set up, even with gulp
2015-03-12 07114, 2015
LordSputnik
The main thing is, I feel like we'll end up implementing a lot of the stuff in Sails ourselves if we don't use it, which would be a waste of time
2015-03-12 07113, 2015
LordSputnik
Oh, and it has built in support for multiple languages, apparently
The whole point of taking some time right now to stabilize the base is to figure out what we need to throw away and what we should keep so that we're not trying to do this once we've started collecting data.
2015-03-12 07123, 2015
LordSputnik
It's better that we structure the app in the best way now, so that we don't end up with 20 different root directories, each with 20 subdirectories containing mixtures of filetypes for various purposes like MusicBrainz has
2015-03-12 07131, 2015
Leftmost
One of the reasons I suggested sails is because we wouldn't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
2015-03-12 07114, 2015
LordSputnik
It can also do nice things like precompile our Jade templates
2015-03-12 07152, 2015
Leo_Verto
hmm, jade caching does sound like a good idea
2015-03-12 07109, 2015
Leftmost
It also gets us data models, which prevents me from having to write them.
2015-03-12 07103, 2015
Leftmost
One thing I noticed was that it talks about being a "backend" framework rather than a "frontend" framework. I don't know what the hell that means, but okay.
2015-03-12 07129, 2015
Leo_Verto
o_O
2015-03-12 07104, 2015
Leftmost
Hmm?
2015-03-12 07145, 2015
Leo_Verto
that's kinda weird, maybe just people using a different definition of "backend"
2015-03-12 07122, 2015
Leftmost
The docs suggest that it's best used for REST APIs and whatnot instead of requests.
2015-03-12 07154, 2015
LordSputnik
It means "server-side" rather than "client-side"
2015-03-12 07109, 2015
LordSputnik
It can be used for REST APIs, or serving HTML, just like express can
2015-03-12 07126, 2015
LordSputnik
(since there's no real difference between those two anyway)
2015-03-12 07152, 2015
Leftmost
LordSputnik, no, they don't mean server-side versus client-side, they mean HTML UI versus REST. Which is why I am confused about it.
2015-03-12 07125, 2015
Leftmost
Okay, some notes on sails looking through their "concepts" page: there seems to be a certain amount of migration baggage that we would have to undertake, whether we choose to do things our way or the sails way, since it prefers to expose its own controller objects rather than the express router.
2015-03-12 07145, 2015
LordSputnik
Leftmost: "A "back-end web" framework helps you do things like build APIs, serve HTML files, and handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users. Sails is "that kind" of web framework."
"Sometimes, when we refer to the "web", we mean the "front-end web." We think of concepts like web standards, or HTML 5, or CSS 3; and frameworks like Backbone, or Angular, or jQuery."
2015-03-12 07142, 2015
Leftmost
LordSputnik, perhaps I misread that, then.
2015-03-12 07135, 2015
Leftmost
It also has some additional baggage that I don't think we really need, like their middleware stack thing, which appears to be sugar for app.use(), and kind of annoying sugar at that. The two things I see us needing from it would be models and i18n, both of which it handles with external libraries.
2015-03-12 07150, 2015
Leftmost
(waterline and i18n-node, respectively.)
2015-03-12 07157, 2015
LordSputnik
I kinda liked its middleware configuration thing
2015-03-12 07130, 2015
LordSputnik
I think it'll be easier to use it all together than take parts of it and bolt it on to what we have
2015-03-12 07133, 2015
Leftmost
I don't think we'd be bolting, really. We'd use it in much the same way we'd have to use it with sails without really any additional work, as far as I can see.
2015-03-12 07157, 2015
Leftmost
Their i18n module also appears to use custom JSON files instead of a standard format like PO.
2015-03-12 07139, 2015
LordSputnik
JSON for translations isn't that bad, it's what I did for waveplot
2015-03-12 07101, 2015
Leftmost
It's bad in that I can't use any of my standard translation tools to do the translation work.
2015-03-12 07123, 2015
Leftmost
I'd much rather we use a gettext-based lib.
2015-03-12 07147, 2015
LordSputnik
Ok, I'm sure there are others
2015-03-12 07103, 2015
LordSputnik
Perhaps let's just user waterline for now then
2015-03-12 07106, 2015
Leftmost
A quick google came up with node-gettext, which looks workable.
2015-03-12 07131, 2015
Leftmost
LordSputnik, I think that makes the most sense. Worse comes to worst, I think that we'll be able to switch to sails without too much difficulty since we'd still just be using its ORM.
2015-03-12 07104, 2015
Leftmost
I think I'm just wary of using solutions that try to do too much for us, since my experience with such solutions has been that I typically want to do things differently.
2015-03-12 07101, 2015
Leftmost
One of the guiding principles I want to propose also is to, as much as we can, avoid relying on any one technology. A better one always comes along, and I think MB has struggled a fair bit from that sort of reliance.
2015-03-12 07127, 2015
LordSputnik
Leftmost: Ok, let's talk more about that tomorrow, I have to go now
2015-03-12 07136, 2015
Leftmost
Alright, works for me.
2015-03-12 07141, 2015
Leftmost
See you tomorrow.
2015-03-12 07123, 2015
LordSputnik has left the channel
2015-03-12 07137, 2015
bookzombie
[bookbrainz-site] leftmostcat pushed 1 new commit to master: http://git.io/pD7O
2015-03-12 07138, 2015
bookzombie
bookbrainz-site/master 0f1a860 Seán de Búrca: Set configuration based on environment
2015-03-12 07145, 2015
Ben|Nexus joined the channel
2015-03-12 07125, 2015
Ben|Nexus
Hey, just came back to say, I'm not convinced waterline will be as suited to defining models as backbone - waterline doesn't seem to be aimed at using a web service, while backbone is
2015-03-12 07158, 2015
Leftmost
LordSputnik, I don't think there would be any issue at all with using a REST adapter for it, whereas backbone would pull in a whole lot of other stuff we don't need or want.
