Saturn VS SailsJS

Today I don't have a new series to start with but rather a simple example which may or may not grow in another blog series. For the moment we'll talk about how to do File uploads to an F# backend powered by Falco and Saturn so let's get started!

Bix is a micro-framework designed with F# in mind and that runs on both Deno and Bun! and in theory it also should even run in a service worker! (intercepting fetch requests) although I haven't tested that yet, it offers a general purpose handler that coupled with a set of route definitions it can bring a Giraffe/Saturn like framework to life in JavaScript runtimes which is incredibly awesome! useful? maybe not 😅, but awesome indeed. Let's see some code for it

Backend: Most likely it would be a toss between https://saturnframework.org or https://giraffe.wiki. They both combins the extremely good type system in F# combined with the ease of a minimal API.

The "S" stands for Saturn. Suave is not very popular.

While for a proof of concept Suave did great, I switched it in favor of Saturn given my familiarity with it and some ASP.NET code.

Saturn is heavily inspired by phoenix and has similar generators, and a channel system that is similar. As well as almost the exact same syntax for the router with plugs and all.

Today we'll try to keep it as simple as possible but no promises, since this entry is about creating web servers in F# using Saturn and not only that, we'll also try to go for a more traditional'ish MVC.

🌱release on github

Sails is a realtime JavaScript framework built on top of Express. Sails offers built-in realtime communication support and a flexible routing system.

Community stats: Sails GitHub repository has an active community with 22.78k stars and 2k forks. They also have a YouTube channel with a library of useful tutorial videos.

Sails.js: Sails.js pitched itself as the MVC framework for Node.js, bringing a Rails-like experience while being database agnostic.

Disclaimer: I didn't know much about Websockets 1 week ago, all the experience I had with Websockets was when I developed a chat application back in 2016 using a JS framework that tried to be a Ruby on Rails implementation called SailsJS, so I decided to research about this technology and consumed multiple resources which I will link in this blog post and each section.

Perhaps Sails.js. They mention RoR. An Angular teacher used it to create a fast API.

I was just talking about this topic of whether we really has any Rails-influenced JS frameworks out there in the wild. And I struggled to come up with anything off the top of my head other than Sails.js [1]. RedwoodJS looks interesting, what about it in particular do you find exciting?

[1] https://github.com/balderdashy/sails

Sails JS – The MVC framework for Node.js

First hurdle. ExpressJS isn't a great framework on it's own for building web sites. You need to cobble together some combination of a view engine, templating etc otherwise out of the box you'll end up handcrafting HTML which I don't think is what you want right now. I'm not up on the latest server-side web frameworks and don't think now is the time to get into react + nodejs. So I'll just suggest Sails: https://sailsjs.com/. Follow their intro guides to get yourself a basic website with text entry.