Enterprise application server for Node.js: secure, lightweight, interactive, and scalable.
Description
First Node.js server scaled with multithreading and extra thin workload isolation. Optimized for high-intensive data exchange, rapid development, and clean architecture. Provides everything you need out of the box for reliable and efficient backend, network communication with web and mobile clients, protocol-agnostic API, run-time type validation, real-time and in-memory data processing, and reliable stateful services.
Weak sides: not a good choice for content publishing including blogs and online stores, server-side rendering, serving static content and stateless services.
Strong sides: security and architecture for enterprise-level applications, long-lived connections over websocket to minimize overhead for cryptographic handshake, no third-party dependencies.
Quick start
- See project template: metarhia/Example
- Start server with
node server.js - See documentation and specifications
API endpoint example: application/api/example.1/citiesByCountry.js
async ({ countryId }) => {
const fields = ['cityId', 'name'];
const where = { countryId };
const data = await db.select('City', fields, where);
return { result: 'success', data };
};You can call it from client-side:
const res = await metacom.api.example.citiesByCountry({ countryId: 3 });Metarhia and impress application server way
- Applied code needs to be simple and secure, so we use sandboxing with v8 isolated contexts, worker threads and javascript closures;
- Domain code should be separated from system code; so we use DDD, layered (onion) architecture, DI, SOLID and GRASP principles, contract-based approach;
- Impress supports stateful applications with RPC and client-session sticky to servers; microservices, centralized or distributed architecture;
- No I/O is faster even than async I/O, so we hold state in memory, share it among multiple threads and use lazy I/O for persistent storage;
- We use just internal trusted dependencies, no third-party npm packages; total Metarhia technology stack size is less than 2mb.
Features
- Auto API routing, just create endpoint files as an async function;
- Code live reload with file system watch (when files change on disk);
- Graceful shutdown and application state recovery after reload;
- Minimal dependencies and code size;
- Can scale with multiple threads and servers;
- Code sandboxing for security and context isolation;
- Auto module loader with dependency injection for namespaces;
- Layered architecture out of the box: core, domain, API, client;
- Utilize multiple CPU cores and serve multiple ports with worker threads;
- Inter-process communication and shared memory used for state management;
- State synchronization mechanism with transactions and subscription;
- Cache server-side executable JavaScript in memory;
- Rapid API development support: AJAX RPC and Websocket;
- Serve static files from memory cache;
- Application configuration (for different named environments);
- Database access layer for PostgreSQL and relational db schemas;
- Persistent sessions support with authentication, groups, and anonymous;
- Multiple protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, WS, WSS;
- Logging with buffering (lazy write) and rotation (keep logs N days);
- File utilities: upload, download, streaming;
- Built-in simple testing framework;
- Server health monitoring;
- Built-in data structures validation and preprocessing library;
- Task scheduling (interval or certain time);
- Concurrency control: request queue with timeout and size;
- Execution timeout and error handling;
Requirements
- Node.js v16.0.0 or later (v18 preferred)
- Linux (tested on Fedora 36, 37, Ubuntu 18, 20 and 22, CentOS 7, 8, 9)
- Postgresql 11 or later (v14 preferred)
- OpenSSL v3 or later (optional, for https & wss)
- certbot (recommended but optional)
License & Contributors
Copyright (c) 2012-2023 Metarhia contributors. See github for full contributors list. Impress Application Server is MIT licensed. Project coordinator: <[email protected]>