Hop Aboard Sailing RESTfully With Sails ⛵️— an introduction to Sails v1.0
Sails makes it easy to build custom, enterprise-grade Node.js apps.
Hello there reader, how is it going? So today I want to introduce(or reintroduce) you to an awesome NodeJS framework I discovered when researching for an MVC framework for a project’s web service.
If you have been following me, you’d notice I have been pretty passionate about learning and building highly scalable web services. So let’s Sail, shall we?
What is Sails?
Build practical, production-ready Node.js apps in a matter of weeks, not months. Sails is the most popular MVC framework for Node.js, designed to emulate the familiar MVC pattern of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the requirements of modern apps: data-driven APIs with a scalable, service-oriented architecture. — From the Sails Docs
Sails is a real-time modern NodeJS MVC framework modeling the goodies in frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Laravel and with quite a lot added. Let’s see “a lot”: 😉
What Sails Offer
- Code is written in good old Javascript(though sails could be customized to use TypeScript). That means JS both on clients and server.
- Sails come with out of the box support for any database(MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL etc) with its ORM Waterline
- Sails have blueprints which help jump-start rest apis without writing any code(more on this in another article)
- Sails play nicely with any front-end: Angular, React, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, custom hardware, or something else entirely. What this means is it takes little leaven zero configurations to get started integrating your favorite front-end framework with Sails.
- Sails come fully with Websocket integration.
- Sails offers commercial support to accelerate development and ensure best practices in your code.
Wow! Sails seem like a NodeJS developer’s El Dorado(doesn’t it?) and I think you will find it rather pleasing that Sails is built on top of ExpressJS, so it will be familiar if you already do Express(though not a prerequisite for learning Sails).
I am pretty much excited about the framework but if my excitement isn’t enough to convince you, please sail 😀 to the official site and check it out.
Conclusion
Sails is 1.0 recently and quite a lot have changed and improved. I will be unraveling these changes and improvements in subsequent Sails articles.
Here is to being a better you 🍷
