Inward

Growing node-based apps can be difficult. Even if your service is just medium sized, weird bugs and hard-to-think-about concurrency can be all too common.

Inward is about leveraging new node.js tech to make your life easier, even as your app grows.

What Tech?

Inward uses two main ideas - that immutable data (provided by facebook's immutable library) makes hard-to-find bugs hard-to-write, and promises make node.js' asynchronous IO less painful for you to use.

So this is new, cutting edge, risky stuff?

Promises have become so popular, they've been penciled in as an official part of the next JavaScript spec. Immutable has facebook's stamp of approval, hundreds of thousands of monthly downloads, and is based on the same techniques that form the core of clojure's datastructures.

Using promises and immutable data together in a http server is also nothing new - we're just borrowing a leaf out of the playbook of major frameworks from other languages - frameworks I've used in anger with plenty of success.

Now is the right time.

Hello World

var Inward = require('inward');
var Response = Inward.Response;
var Route = Inward.Route;

var helloWorldHandler = function(request){
    var params = request.get('params');
    return Response.OK('hi, ' + params.get('name'));
};

var route404 = function(){
    return Response.NotFound("ain't nothing to see here");
};

var server = Inward.Server({
    routes: [
        Route.Get('/hello/:name', helloWorldHandler),
        Route.Any('*', route404)
    ]
});

Inward.runHttp(server, 3000);

Quick-Start Guide

To get up and running quickly, see the Quick-Start Guide;

API Documentation

For in-depth info for every function, see the API Documentation.