There are interesting challenges in building complex Node.js projects such as an open framework or a large-scale application that involves many modules, components and teams. As platform developers, we love to have the foundation to perform common tasks and enforce best practices without repeating ourselves. On the other hand, we also want to give control to developers if needed to solve the problem in their preferred ways or to bring in additional capabilities seamlessly without breaking the foundation. This tutorial will walk you through scenarios and strategies to allow your Node.js project to scale up with many types of artifacts bundled in multiple npm modules, developed by different developers and teams. To name a few such use cases:
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Customize the behavior of certain features, for example, use a different algorithm to hash passwords, allow a different logger function, or replace the built-in access control
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Extend the capabilities of your framework/application, for example, allow a new authentication strategy, connect to a different database, or support another object storage provider
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Decompose a flow/sequence of processing into actions, for example, perform authentication and authorization, impose rate limiting, route to corresponding controllers/methods, and invoke business logic to produce the response
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Compose a set of actions into a meaningful flow/sequence, for example, set up a pipeline to process HTTP requests/responses, or allow delegation from controllers to repositories/connectors to interact with databases
This tutorial examines those typical scenarios where loose coupling is critical for various parts to work together without knowing much about one another and introduces common patterns to solve such problems with example code:
- Decoration and reflection: provide metadata management to capture knowledge of various artifacts
- Inversion of control and dependency injection: manage artifacts and their dependencies for resolution and composition - not the same old IoC and DI - it’s built for async!
- Extension points and extensions: organize artifacts with loose coupling and promote extensibility
- Chain of responsibility: align a set of action into a meaningful sequence or flow
- Observation and notification: enable (async) event driven collaboration
LoopBack: Helps you in building large scale Node.js applications
LoopBack 4 core is an open source TypeScript platform for Node.js, specializing in building large scale applications with great flexibility, composability, and extensibility.
The module @loopback/core is used by the LoopBack framework to offer API and Microservice capabilities.
It builds on top of the following lower-level modules:
Any of these three modules can be used independently as a base platform to build large scale applications in TypeScript and Node.js.
Design goals
Some characteristics of large scale applications are:
- Developed by many teams/developers
- Maintained for many years and releases
- Created as many modules
- Have many dependencies
Architectural disciplines that are required to support such large scale applications, including:
- Modular/Decoupling
- Composable
- Extensible
There are conflict of interests between the two:
- Modular/Decoupling/Consistent vs. Fragmentation/Friction
- Composable vs. Extensible
Scenario
We are going to use the Greeter Extension to illustrate how LoopBack can help you to build large scale Node.js applications.