Intro to Development

Technologies

The application consists currently of the following stack:

Server:

• Node.js (server side javascript server)
• Express (middleware)
• Socket.io (advanced sockets connectivity/streaming)
• MongoDB (Mongoose ODM) (nosql database)
• Jade (templating language, similar to HAML)
• redis / connect-redis (real-time in memory database for session management)
• log4js (logging library)
• LESS (css superset - adds features such as mixins and variables etc)
• http-proxy (used here to reroute calls to localhost/forum to localhost:9000 which is where the OSQA forum software is running on apache)

For those who are fairly new to Node.js and Async programming:

• http://nodeguide.com/beginner.html (A technical introduction to Node.js)
• http://www.nodebeginner.org/ (Another Node.js introduction, slightly more descriptive)
• http://howtonode.org/ (Collection of articles for understanding of specific topics)

External server software:

• MongoDB
• Redis
• Apache
• OSQA Discussion forum software

Client software:

• Javascript
• HTML 5
• CSS 3 Plans are being made to put a MVC framework in place, either Backbone.js, Railway.js, Flatiron.js etc) to give one page ajax like functionality

Note: Google Chrome is considered the first browser. If something works on lastest Chrome, but doesn't work on another browser, log a browser compatibility issue.

Structure of the code

Bootstrap code resides in /server.js, which initializes the application, loads all the required modules and starts the server(s).

The main files that you will interact with during development are:

• /**
  1. server.js (main server file)
  2. configLocal.js (configuration file)
  3. app/ (application code)
     • routes/ (URL Routes)
     • models/ (Mongoose Models)
     • middleware/ (Express middleware)
     • views/ (Jade views)
  4. public/ ( client side code)
     • img/ (client side images)
     • javascripts/ (third party javascript)
     • ace/ (ace editor)
     • jplayer/ (video player)
     • stylesheets/ (compiled from twitter bootstrap less files and third party stylesheets)
     • views/ (jade templates rendered by the node.js server into html which are sent to the client) (partial view fragments start with an "_" and will be loaded in by ajax etc as needed in future, currently used to keep the views of a manageable size)
  5. test/ (Unit tests written using Mocha)

A few notes related to the structure:

1. All the routes are consolidated in routes/index.js. Routes are categorized according to their access object (e.g. course, admin, chapter etc.) and are stored in a separate file in app/routes directory. Each operation is described using a function in its specific route file.
2. Models are initialized using Mongoose and are stored into their own file in app/models directory. They are initialized in server.js database section (e.g. load.init_model() calls)
3. There is a global load object, which can be used to access models, controllers, helpers, middleware etc. from anywhere in the application.

• Initialize Model - load.init_model('<filename>')
• Load Model - load.model('<modelName>')
• Load Controller/Routes Object - load.controller('<filename>')
• Load Helper - load.helper('<filename>')
• Load Middleware - load.middleware('<filename>')