Matador

DEPRECATION WARNING: Matador has been deprecated and is no longer actively maintained. We do not recommend continuing to use Matador.

Sane defaults and a simple structure, scaling as your application grows.

Matador is a clean, organized framework for Node.js architected to suit MVC enthusiasts. It gives you a well-defined development environment with flexible routing, easy controller mappings, and basic request filtering. It’s built on open source libraries such as SoyNode for view rendering, and connect.js to give a bundle of other Node server related helpers.

Installation

Get the CLI

$ npm install matador -g

Create an app

$ matador init my-app
$ cd my-app && npm install matador

Start your app

$ node server.js

Dancing with the Bulls

Build on your app

// app/config/routes.js
'/hello/:name': { 'get': 'Home.hello' }

// app/controllers/HomeController.js
hello: function (request, response, name) {
  response.send('hello ' + name)
}

View Rendering

Uses SoyNode to render Closure Templates.

// app/controllers/HomeController.js
this.render(response, 'index', {
  title: 'Hello Bull Fighters'
})

<!-- app/views/layout.soy -->

{namespace views.layout}

/**
 * Renders the index page.
 * @param title Title of the page.
 */
{template .layout autoescape="contextual"}
  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html>
    <head>
      <meta http-equiv='Content-type' content='text/html; charset=utf-8'>
      <title>{$title}</title>
      <link rel='stylesheet' href='/css/main.css' type='text/css'>
    </head>
    <body>
      {$ij.bodyHtml |noAutoescape}
    </body>
  </html>
{/template}

{namespace views.index}

/**
 * Renders a welcome message.
 * @param title Title of the page
 */
{template .welcome}
  <h1>Welcome to {$title}</h1>
  (rendered with Closure Templates)
{/template}

Routing

The app/config/routes.js file is where you specify an array of tuples indicating where incoming requests will map to a controller and the appropriate method. If no action is specified, it defaults to 'index' as illustrated below:

module.exports = function (app) {
  return {
    '/': 'Home' // maps to ./HomeController.js => index
  , '/admin': 'Admin.show' // maps to ./admin/AdminController.js => show
  }
}

You can also specify method names to routes:

module.exports = function (app) {
  return {
    '/posts': {
      'get': 'Posts.index', // maps to PostsController.js => #index
      'post': 'Posts.create' // maps to PostsController.js => #create
    }
  }
}

How can I organize my Models?

By default, Models are thin with just a Base and Application Model in place. You can give them some meat, for example, and embed Mongo Schemas. See the following as a brief illustration:

// app/models/ApplicationModel.js
module.exports = function (app, config) {
  var BaseModel = app.getModel('Base', true)

  function ApplicationModel() {
    BaseModel.call(this)
    this.mongo = require('mongodb')
    this.mongoose = require('mongoose')
    this.Schema = this.mongoose.Schema
    this.mongoose.connect('mongodb://localhost/myapp')
  }
  util.inherits(ApplicationModel, BaseModel)
  return ApplicationModel
}

Then create, for example, a UserModel.js that extended it...

module.exports = function (app, config) {
  var ApplicationModel = app.getModel('Application', true)

  function UserModel() {
    ApplicationModel.call(this)
    this.DBModel = this.mongoose.model('User', new this.Schema({
        name: { type: String, required: true, trim: true }
      , email: { type: String, required: true, lowercase: true, trim: true }
    }))
  }
  util.inherits(UserModel, ApplicationModel)
  return DBModel

  UserModel.prototype.create = function (name, email, callback) {
    var user = new this.DBModel({
        name: name
      , email: email
    })
    user.save(callback)
  }

  UserModel.prototype.find = function (id, callback) {
    this.DBModel.findById(id, callback)
  }

}

This provides a proper abstraction between controller logic and how your models interact with a database then return data back to controllers.

Take special note that models do not have access to requests or responses, as they rightfully shouldn't.

Model & Controller Inheritance

Matador uses the default node inheritance patterns via util.inherits.

Scaffolding

$ matador controller [name]
$ matador model [name]

Contributing & Development

Questions, pull requests, bug reports are all welcome. Submit them here on Github. When submitting pull requests, please run through the linter to conform to the framework style

$ npm install -d
$ npm run-script lint

Authors

Obviously, Dustin Senos & Dustin Diaz

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Medium/matador

Medium

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