In this three part tutorial series, we’ll be diving deep into the process of creating a to-do list management app in Node.js and Geddy from scratch. In this introductory article, we’ll review how to install Node.js on Windows and OS X, getting Geddy installed, and generating our first app. Ready?
What is Node?
If you’ve been developing web apps for the last couple of years, you’re likely already familiar with Node.js, but let’s go over it – just in case you’re new to the scene.
Node.js is a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building applications in JavaScript that run on the server. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model, which makes it perfect for building real time apps.
What is Geddy?
Geddy should feel very familiar to you.
Geddy is a simple and structured MVC (model, view, controller) framework for Node.js. You can use it to quickly create web apps and JSON APIs. If you’ve done any level of work with Ruby on Rails or PHP’s CodeIgniter, Geddy should feel very familiar to you; it’s got a restful router, template rendering, controllers, and models.
Installing Node.js
Node.js runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux. I’ll show you how to get set up on both Windows and OS X. if you’re on Linux I’ll assume that you’ve got Node installed, know how to get it installed, or know someone that can help you with the process.
First, go to http://nodejs.org and click the download button. Find the installer link for your operating system, and download it. Follow the installation prompt to get installed. If you’re on Windows, you may need to reboot your computer to get the ‘node’ command on to your path.
You should now have both Node and npm (Node Package Manager) installed.
Installing Geddy with npm
Node has a great package manager built right in. It’s called, npm, and, as of this writing, there are nearly 8,000 packages available. Check out http://toolbox.no.de to browse through them if you’d like. For this tutorial, however, we’ll use npm to install Geddy (our framework) and Jake (the build tool that Geddy uses):
Jake is a JavaScript build program for Node.js.
- Open up your terminal
- type
npm install -g geddy jake
That’s it! Now that you’ve got Geddy installed, let’s see about generating your first app.
Generating a Geddy App
Geddy uses a global executable to generate apps/resources, and to start up your app server. This will all take place on the command line, so open up your terminal again. Before we generate our app, let’s
cd to a good location to store your app. This can be anywhere on your machine, though, I prefer to do my development in my ~/dev/ directory.
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| cd path/to/the/place/you/code |
Next, we’ll use
geddy to generate our app structure. We’ll be creating a to-do application, so we’ll call ours,todo_app
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| geddy app todo_app |
All done. Now what did that do for us?
An Overview of Our Generated App
If you take a look within the newly created
todo_app directory, you’ll see that Geddy has generated a fair bit of code for you. Your directory structure should look a bit like this:- app/
- controllers/
- models/
- views/
- config/
- lib/
- log/
- node_modules/
- public/
Let’s step through these one by one:
app: Here’s where most of the magic happens. Most of your app’s logic will be located in one of the three directories contained in this one.
app/controllers: All of your app’s controllers (the part that ties your models to your views) go here. You’ll also notice that there’s already two controller files in there:
application.js (which all controllers inherit from) and main.js (the controller that ties your / route to your app/views/main/index.html.ejstemplate).
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