Frameworks for Node.js
You learned that we need to write lots of low level code ourselves to create a web application using Node.js in Node.js web server section.
There are various third party open-source frameworks available in Node Package Manager which makes Node.js application development faster and easy. You can choose an appropriate framework as per your application requirements.
The following table lists frameworks for Node.js.
| Open-Source Framework | Description |
|---|---|
| Express.js | Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications. This is the most popular framework as of now for Node.js. |
| Geddy | Geddy is a simple, structured web application framework for Node.js based on MVC architecture. |
| Locomotive | Locomotive is MVC web application framework for Node.js. It supports MVC patterns, RESTful routes, and convention over configuration, while integrating seamlessly with any database and template engine. Locomotive builds on Express, preserving the power and simplicity you've come to expect from Node. |
| Koa | Koa is a new web framework designed by the team behind Express, which aims to be a smaller, more expressive, and more robust foundation for web applications and APIs. |
| Total.js | Totaljs is free web application framework for building web sites and web applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS on Node.js |
| Hapi.js | Hapi is a rich Node.js framework for building applications and services. |
| Keystone | Keystone is the open source framework for developing database-driven websites, applications and APIs in Node.js. Built on Express and MongoDB. |
| Derbyjs | Derby support single-page apps that have a full MVC structure, including a model provided by Racer, a template and styles based view, and controller code with application logic and routes. |
| Sails.js | Sails makes it easy to build custom, enterprise-grade Node.js apps. It is 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. It's especially good for building chat, realtime dashboards, or multiplayer games; but you can use it for any web application project - top to bottom. |
| Meteor | Meteor is a complete open source platform for building web and mobile apps in pure JavaScript. |
| Mojito | This HTML5 framework for the browser and server from Yahoo offers direct MVC access to the server database through the local routines. One clever feature allows the code to migrate. If the client can't run JavaScript for some reason, Mojito will run it on the server -- a convenient way to handle very thin clients. |
| Restify | Restify is a node.js module built specifically to enable you to build correct REST web services. |
| Loopback | Loopback is an open-source Node.js API framework. |
| ActionHero | actionhero.js is a multi-transport Node.JS API Server with integrated cluster capabilities and delayed tasks. |
| Frisby | Frisby is a REST API testing framework built on node.js and Jasmine that makes testing API endpoints easy, fast, and fun. |
| Chocolate.js | Chocolate is a simple webapp framework built on Node.js using Coffeescript. |
Learn about Express.js framework in the next section.