/compose

Compose is a simple service that accepts the necessary information and sends emails.

Primary LanguageCoffeeScript

Compose

This project created as a technical challenge for an interview and completed relatively small amount of time. It's not recommended to use this in real life projects. I open sourced this to help others and get and idea of how something like this can be done.

Compose is a very simple email sending tool. It's written for a technical challenge for Frontend Engineer position. You can think it like a simple Sent box of an email client.

Here is the screencast, it may take some time to load and it may cut in half because of GitHub proxy. Better Cmd+click here and open in a new tab.

Compose Screencast

Technologies used

Backend
  • NodeJS
  • MongoLab
  • Mongoose
  • Express
  • MailgunJS
  • Nodemailer
Frontend
  • CoffeeScript
  • Grunt
  • Bower
  • Karma
  • Stylus
  • jQuery
  • Handlebars
  • Jasmine

The challenge was expecting me to implement an email sending service with a failover mechanism. If one of the services goes down it should immediately switch to another service.

Setting up and running project on local

This projects depends NodeJS, npm, grunt and bower. I assume you already have them on your own machine. Remember that you will need Mongo and mailgun credentials to send and recieve emails.

Testing

I implemented Karma Test Runner with Jasmine and PhantomJS and added a few tests which you can see in test_AppController.coffee. To run tests you need to run grunt karma. It has its own file watcher so tests will run on background when you change a code.

How did I implement it?

Backend

  • App uses an implementation of Express server. In routes.coffee it adds pre-defined routes to Express Router. * will serve the index.html. For mail API get and post request are handled and wired to MailModel.

  • App uses a free sandbox MongoDB instance from MongoLab and uses Mongoose to make it easy to working with Mongo. In compose.coffee a MongoDB connection is established. In MailModel.coffee a Mongoose schema is created and it's ready to handle Mongo operations.

  • There are two different mail services to send mails which are MailgunService and NodeMailerService. Both of them is an implementation of AbstractMailService to provide the same public API.

  • There is a MailSender implementation. Basically you write your services and register them to MailSender in priority then you use MailSender to send mails. It will use registered services and failover between them.

  • When a mail is composed, MailSender will send it then MailModel will save it to MongoDB so then we can fetch and list composed mails in UI after refreshing the page.

Front End

  • There is an AppController which will create Router and AppView. AppController is responsible to handle app state and it listens route changes to update views by telling to AppView which is responsible from drawing UI widgets and binding required events.

  • All views are extending from a BaseView which provides some useful methods like render, attach and detach. For example, you can say a view class to render into an element by adding a renderTo option to your view class.

  • All classes are extending from EventEmitter to be all event driven.

  • A few words view management, BaseView expects template and renderTo options to work with. template is basically a Handlebars compiled function which will return a string markup. BaseView converts string markup into a DOM element using jQuery and append/prepend it to render target which is the renderTo option. Also we can use attach to add the template element into any other element and detach to remove it from DOM.

  • Third party scripts are bundled in a file named compose.third_party.min.js and app scripts are bundled into a file named compose.min.js. There are several Grunt tasks in build folder which will transpile CoffeeScript's to JavaScript and minify and concat them using UglifyJS.

  • Stylus files are transpiled into CSS with Grunt Stylus task and all of them will be placed in a file named compose.min.css.

  • App will only download compose.third_party.min.js, compose.min.js and compose.min.css.

  • A footnote here, Browserify and WebPack would more easy to manage the dependencies and bundle them so I can get rid of the file arrays on uglify.coffee task.