About

AspJS is a server-side framework for "classic" ASP written in Javascript with an emphasis on "separation of concerns". It is designed to abstract database access, file system operations, request routing, sessions, templating and other server-side concepts into modular, intuitive Javascript interfaces.

Features

Clean Code Separation
Module System similar to CommonJS
Request Routing (Sinatra-style)
Rich Templating Engine (based on normal-template from Nitro)
Powerful Model layer with validation and relationships (based on ActiveRecord)
Event Binding
Persistent Session layer with namespacing and expiry options
Server-Side HTML Parsing, including DOM, Sizzle and jQuery
Helper functions for:
- JSON
- date parsing/manipulating/formatting
- sending email
- binary data
- charset conversion

Description

This framework focuses on separating business logic from presentation by implementing a variation of the "Model View Controller" (MVC) architectural pattern. This is achieved using several techniques commonly found in other web frameworks such as request routing, view templates, object-relational mapping, modular libraries, event listeners, etc.

This framework takes inspiration from, and in some cases shares code with, other server-side Javascript frameworks such as [v8cgi] (http://code.google.com/p/v8cgi/), Jaxer, [Connect] (http://senchalabs.github.com/connect/) and even client-side libraries like [jQuery] (http://jquery.com/) and Underscore.

Introduction

Applications consist primarily of request handler functions which are defined inside controllers. Request handlers are attached to the application (request router) once the "ready" event fires (indicating the framework has loaded) as follows:

bind('ready', function() {
  //YOUR CODE HERE
});

Within the "ready" event handler, request routes are defined as follows:

app('/', function() {
  res.die('text/html', '<p>Hello World</p>');
});

Here, "res" is the response object and res.die() is shorthand for:

res.clear('text/html');
res.write('<p>Hello World</p>');
res.end();

Similarly, app('/', function() {...}) presents a shortcut for adding routes, rather than:

req.router.addRoute('GET', '/', function() {
  ...
});

Named parameters are available via a passed-in accessor like so:

app('/user/:name', function(params) {
  res.die('text/html', '<p>Hello ' + htmlEnc(params('name')) + '</p>');
});

The htmlEnc() function here is shorthand for String.htmlEnc() and makes your output safe for HTML.

Global shorthand functions include: vartype, isPrimitive, isSet, toArray, forEach, urlEnc, urlDec, htmlEnc and htmlDec

Other important global functions are: bind and lib. As you saw in the first example, bind attaches an event handler and as you will see shortly, lib loads a module (library) similar to require in other common javascript frameworks (the lib syntax was chosen over require to avoid conflicts when adapting this framework to other platforms).

Also, the global objects app, req, res and util are available for for convenience so you don't have to explicitly load them like:

var app = lib('application'), req = lib('request'), res = lib('response'), util = lib('util');

An example of loading, the "net" library, sending an email and then responding with a 302 redirect:

var net = lib('net');
net.sendEmail({
  to:        'john.doe@gmail.com',
  from:      'myself@me.com',
  subject:   'Test Message',
  body_text: 'Hello. This is a test email.'
});
res.redirect('/success');

##Application Structure Application code (business logic) goes in controller files in app/controllers/ and helper files in app/shared/. Models are defined in app/models/. Templates go in app/views/ and configuration (JSON format) goes in app/config/config.js.

Data files (db, uploads, logs, etc.) reside in app/data/ and all framework code is found in app/system/.

Static assets (images, css files, etc.) to be served directly to the public go in the /assets/ directory.

##How it Works URL Rewriting causes all requests that do not begin with "/assets/" to be passed to /dispatch.asp which looks at the app/routes.js file to determine which controller should handle the request.

The dispatch script then calls a controller "stub" in the app/build/ directory which loads all the framework and application code and then fires the "ready" event.

If the expected controller stub does not exist in app/build/ then dispatch will attempt to create it based on files inside app/controllers/ and certain _inc.xml files.

##Read More

See more code examples in the [Wiki] (/sstur/aspjs/wiki/Home).

erlhal/aspjs

About

Features

Description

Introduction