[Update: Since I posted this article, I have been informed that the domino-db node integration will be available in beta with Domino10 in a week’s time!]

With Domino 10 nearly upon us, and the Node integration hopefully following soon after, I thought I would talk about building a full-stack application in Node.js, covering how modern JavaScript UI frameworks can be built on top of Node.js and integrated with Domino in the background as a datastore.

This is all part of the IBM and HCL strategy of having Node.js as a parallel development platform alongside the standard Domino development tools, with Node providing a way for web developers to extend existing Domino apps and datastores. However, you don’t have to wait for the Domino node module to start learning about this.

If you consider the development stack acronyms of DEAN and DERN (or NERD), the UI framework is the ‘A’ and the ‘R”. These initials refer to Angular and React respectively, but generally apply to any JavaScript framework, and there are many very good ones.

The main advantage of a development stack is that the UI layer can be independent of the middleware, server, and datastore layers and so you can replace or modify the UI without impacting the rest of the architecture. As an example, you might want to do this to extend an existing web app onto a mobile platform which may require a different UI.

A review of popular frameworks and their features and advantages is beyond the scope if this post, and I may return to that later, but for now I would like to get into the broader topic of how this all fits together, i.e. how does a JavaScript UI sit ‘on top of’ Node?

The first thing to understand is that UI frameworks such as Angular, React, et al, are nothing to do with Node.js. They are not part of Node.js and do not require Node.js to work. They all run perfectly happily on any web server, including Domino. When we use a UI framework with Node, Node is essentially acting as a web server, serving the framework web pages to a browser which then loads the pages and runs the framework code.

You can run framework components inside a regular Domino web form on a Domino server, but the advantage of using the JavaScript development stack is two-fold. First, the stack is all JavaScript, so it makes it easy to talk between layers because all the data is JSON. Second, we are opening up Domino to a new development arena, with an established community, support resources and third-party products.

JavaScript UI frameworks come in all sizes and flavours, but they all work essentially the same way. You embed some code in your HTML web pages and then call the framework library (usually a js file) to enable the framework within these pages. The key thing is that everything is held in the usual web files and folders which are stored on the web server file system. Your server (whether it is Domino, Node, or Apache) simply serves up these files when a browser hits it.

In my earlier post, I talked about how you can use Express to provide middleware routes in your Node server. Here is an example which uses a static route to serve up the contents of the ‘public’ folder on the server:

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/public'));
const hostname = '127.0.0.1';
const port = 3000;
app.listen(port, hostname, () => {
   console.log(`Server running at http://${hostname}:${port}/`);
});

By default, the server opens the index.html file in that folder. Luckily, this is the default filename used in most UI frameworks, so it is very easy to put your framework web app and all its files and folders in the public folder and run it from your website. The folder structure could look something like this:

node
|   server.js
|   package.json
|
+---node-modules
|   \---(node stuff...)
|
+---public
|      index.html
|      other framework files...
|      +---framework folders...
|      \---etc

The Node server runs from the server.js (using modules such as Express which are installed under the node-modules folder), and serves up the framework UI starting with the index.html in the public folder.

So we have a nice UI running on our node server. Now we need to connect this UI to our data backend. In a Domino web form we would typically make a call to a web agent which would return whatever Domino data we need. Here in Node we do pretty much the same thing, specifically our UI will make a call to an API to get the data.

Node is great at two important roles - being a web server and being an API gateway. So we can add middleware routes to our Node server to handle these API calls.

Let’s suppose we want to get a list of people to display on-screen. In our UI framework we will make a call to an API on the same Node server, something like this:

let uri = myDomain + "/api/people";
request.get( uri ).then( displayTheResults );

So this request would hit our Node server with the route “/api/people”. Currently, our server doesn’t know what to do with this, so let’s add in a new Express route to handle it.

app.get('/api/people', (req, res) => {
   let myResults = doLookup();
   res.json( myResults );
})

function doLookup() {
const { domServer } = require('domino-db');
   domServer(serverConfig).then(
      async (server) => {
         const db = await server.useDatabase(dbConfig);
         const docs = await db.bulkReadDocuments(DQLquery);
         return docs;
   });
}