saurabh-p/bigpipe

Bigpipe is radical new web framework for Node.js, it's heavily inspired by the Facebook's Bigpipe concept

This module is actively being developed. If you are a fearless developer that
isn't scared for a couple bugs you're more than welcome to go on this adventure.
If not, please wait until 1.0 has been released.

BigPipe

BigPipe is a radical new web framework that is inspired by the concept behind Facebook's BigPipe. The general idea is to decompose web pages in to small re-usable chunks of functionality called Pagelets and pipeline them through several execution stages inside web servers or browsers. This allows progressive rendering at the front-end and results in exceptional front-end performance.

Most web frameworks are based on request and response pattern, a request comes in, we process the data and output a template. But before we can output the template we have to wait until all data has been received in order for the template to be processed. This doesn't make any sense for Node.js applications where everything everything is done asynchronous. When received your first batch of data, why not send it directly to the browser so it can start downloading the required CSS, JavaScript and render it.

Installation

BigPipe is distributed through the node package manager (npm) and is written against Node.js 0.10.x.

npm install --save bigpipe

Events

Everything in BigPipe is build upon the EventEmitter interface. It's either a plain EventEmitter or a proper stream. This a summary of the events we emit:

Event	Usage	Location	Description
log	public	server	A new log message.
transform::pagelet	public	server	Transform a Pagelet
transform::page	public	server	Transform a Page
listening	public	server	The server is listening
error	public	server	The HTTP serer received an error

Debugging

The library makes use the debug module and has all it's internals namespaced to bigpipe:. These debug messages can be trigged by starting your application with the DEBUG= env variable. In order to filter out all messages except bigpipe's message run your server with the following command:

DEBUG=bigpipe:* node <server.js>

The following DEBUG namespaces are available:

• bigpipe:server The part that handles the request dispatching, page / pagelet transformation and more.
• bigpipe:pagelet Pagelet interactions
• bigpipe:page Page generation.
• bigpipe:compiler Asset compilation.

Testing

Tests are automatically run on Travis CI to ensure that everything is functioning as intended. For local development we automatically install a pre-commit hook that runs the npm test command every time you commit changes. This ensures that we don't push any broken code in to this project.

License

BigPipe is released under MIT.