Pronto.js: How ConsumerSearch's Mobile API Server is Driven by Node.js

Pronto.js is designed to be a high performance asynchronous application framework that makes it simple to chain together components to build sophisticated application logic. It's the JS equivalent of the PHP Fortissimo framework.

One characteristic that makes both Pronto.js and Fortissimo stand apart is that they provide an alternative to the MVC pattern. They use the Chain-of-Command pattern, which takes a route name and maps it to a series of "commands", each of which is responsible for a different part of the processing. Well-written commands become highly reusable, which makes application development rapid and yet still reliable.

When you build an application the components get chained together into routes with code like this (Pronto.js):

register.route('search')
      .does(InitializeSearchService, 'initialization')
      .does(QueryRemoteSearchService, 'do-search')
        .uses('query').from('get:q')
      .does(SearchTheme, 'format-search-results')
        .uses('searchResults').from('cxt:do-search')
    ;

(Fortissimo code looks similar: $register->route('search')->does(/*…*/)) The simple example above registers the route search to a series of commands that each perform part of the overall task of running a search and formatting the response.

Commands (IntiailizeSearchService, QueryRemoteSearchService and so on) are short pieces of object-oriented code (prototypes in JS, classes in PHP) that take predefined input, perform a simple task, and then return data. My typical command is around 20 lines of code.

I know this is just a brief teaser. We're working on several cool applications built on these technologies. With Pronto.js, we've been able to integrate with a wide variety of NPM packages, while Fortissimo and the Symfony (and other) PHP libraries can be easily combined. In the future, I'll blog some more about Fortissimo and Pronto.js.