Feathers

Let your web app fly.

Feathers is a light weight web application framework that rides on top of Express. It makes it easy to create RESTful web services and real-time applications using socket.io.

The core focus of Feathers is your data. We believe that ultimately your app's purpose is to manage data in some fashion and so that's all you should really need to deal with. Managing your data.

Install

As with any NodeJS module, just install it as a dependency in your application:

npm install feathers --save

Getting Started Is Easy

Building an app with Feathers is easy. There are only 4 things to worry about. A wrapped express server, providers, services & middleware. Services are just simple modules that expose certain methods to the providers in order to CRUD your data. We can easily initialize a service that say... provides a single Todo:

var feathers = require('feathers');

var todoService = {
  get: function(name, params, callback) {
    callback(null, {
      id: name,
      description: "You have to do " + name + "!"
    });
  }
};

feathers()
	.configure(feathers.socketio())
	.use('/todo', todoService)
	.listen(8000);

That's all there really is to building an app with Feathers.

REST

You can access the REST service by going to http://localhost:8000/todo/dishes in your browser and will see:

{
  "id": "dishes",
  "description": "You have to do dishes!"
}

Note: Query parameters like http://localhost:8000/todo/dishes?type=dirty will be passed as params.query

SocketIO

Since we configured our app with feathers.socketio(), you can also connect to your service via SocketIO. Create an HTML page and insert the following code to see the response data logged on the console:

<script src="http://localhost:8000/socket.io/socket.io.js"></script>
<script>
  var socket = io.connect('http://localhost:8000/');
  socket.emit('todo::get', 'laundry', {}, function(error, data) {
    console.log(data); // -> { id: 'laundry', description: 'You have to do laundry!' }
  });
</script>

What's next?