Through the Javascript Looking Glass Part 1: Finding ES6 + NodeJS Alternatives to the Python Stack

Posted on by

Apologies for missing last week’s scheduled post and being late with this week’s post as well. I’ve been putting off writing articles and refilling my queue, with other things that have been (or seemed) more important than blogging. Either way, I’ll try to fix this so that next week I’ll be back to my regular schedule. –Dorian

Introduction

These past weeks right before the start of the new year, I have been experimenting with something new. As part of trying to use server-side rendering for React client inside Rookeries, I decided to figure out how to achieve this using NodeJS. To kill a couple of birds with the same stone, I decided to use this as an opportunity to play around with ES6. In these next few blog post I will write about some of the lessons I learned along the way.

The Project and Its Architecture

To help me focus my learning, I decided to concentrate around a project that would provide a skeleton for my learning. I choose to recreate one of my earlier Flask project, which runs the Amber Penguin Software website. This web application acts as a cross between a static file website and a CMS, by serving template pages that render Markdown into the body of each page. The routing is a fairly trivial look up of flat files, and returning a 404 error page when a page is not found. The tech stack being Flask, a simple [J]inja2](http://jinja.pocoo.org/) template and Markdown as the Markdown rendering engine.

My project consisted of four phases:

  1. Recreate the current setup using a NodeJS tech stack,
  2. Add a simple JSON API to host the API and a simple React component that was “renderable” via the server and the client.
  3. Build out the React app to handle routing and retrieving the content of each page, with a first time server load and subsequent calls via Ajax calls to the JSON API from the frontend React components.
  4. Host the completed app using my existing Ansible setup.

Finding Alternatives

The first task consisted of figuring out what NodeJS technologies I could use to recreate the Python/Flask app. Turns out that the language specific communities in the web app world like to borrow heavily from each other. Just as Ruby’s Sinatra microframework inspired Python’s Flask, so did Node’s ExpressJS take notes from Flask. Jinja2 inspired Mozilla’s Nunjucks and a bunch of other similar templating libraries. (I ended up using Nunjucks since it is the most mature library) Marked replaced Markup. The tricky part was actually replacing Python’s io.open() to open files. With a bit of experimentation I figured out how to use Node’s fs (file system) module and its readFile() and readFileSync() methods.

In short I could translate the tech stack this way:

  • Flask ⇒ ExpressJS
  • Jinja2 ⇒ Nunchucks
  • Markdown ⇒ Marked

Next

Next time, I’ll go into the details of setting up the ExpressJS apps and routes.