Welcome fellow developer !

Documentation of Idylle, an open source REST and Realtime micro framework for NodeJS applications.

Idylle is a thin layer on top of two majors micro frameworks. Express for the REST | HTTP part and Socket.io for the realtime.

Since few years, Javascript has become one of the major language for both front and backend applications. Lot's of server-side frameworks came in the market, Loopback, Sails, Feathers, Nest, each of them with their philosophy, some focusing on developer productivity, others on the Programming Paradigm, other on the Architecture.

Idylle wants to stay a micro framework by its lack of bundled functionality like :

• Accounts, authentication, authorization, roles, etc.

• Database abstraction

• Input validation and input sanitation.

• Web template engine.

Not providing those feature out of the box doesn't mean you cannot find open source modules/tools avoiding you to redesign the wheel. It just means we think providing a framework doing everything is like having a 'God Class'. It could work, for a time, but the more you progress the less it becomes clear, ending with a black box that no one understand and no one wants to touch.

The Story

This framework has been designed in 2016 because of the lack of choices in terms of lightweight frameworks. For sure there was Express, Hapi, Total.js and all sorts of micro frameworks, but none of them where fitting with our expectations in terms of Architecture.

Mainly developed by one person (so far), it has been used by teams from different backgrounds, server-side developers, junior/seniors Web Front developers, seniors Android / iOS Developers. The main feedback is the "Steep learning curve". As long as you have the core concept of Asynchronous programming, Javascript Promises and Multitier architecture, you are good to go! Everything else will seem really simple.

The Philosophy

Model Oriented | Designed for Microservices

When Idylle has been designed it was after a major shift in our server side architecture. Even if we adopted CI/CD, and N-tier architecture, we wasn't really aware of more granular concepts like Microservices.

At the time we tried few frameworks (Loopback.io and Sails.js) and even if we loved the concepts behind each, we felt like making a choice without a full commitment.

When we designed Idylle it was (and still is) with the goal of providing the best tools for micro-services architectures.