ActionHero VS Bazel

ActionHero.js is one of the most well-known API frameworks. It will help you quickly develop scalable and reusable Node.js API servers for your projects. ActionHero acts as a toolkit that will allow you to build such API servers that will initially work together with existing applications and platforms. With tens of thousands of users, you can always find the right answers and ideas to ensure a daily efficient workflow with ActionHero.

Two of the major components of the @grouparoo/core application are a Node.js API server and a React frontend. We use Actionhero as the API server, and Next.JS for our React site generator. As we develop the Grouparoo application, we are constantly adding new API endpoints and changing existing ones.

At Grouparoo, we use Actionhero as our Node.js API server and Sequelize for our Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tool - making it easy to work with complex records from our database. Within our Actions and Tasks, we often want to treat the whole execution as a single database transaction - either all the modifications to the database will succeed or fail as a unit. This is really helpful when a single activity may create or modify many database rows.

Hard to say without knowing /what/ you want to accomplish in your CI process, so maybe some open source examples will help:

* A "complex" library (node-resque). In CI (CircleCI) we install deps, compile Typescript to JS, test on 3 versions of node, and build docs. 4 min w/ some parallelization https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/actionhero/node-re...

* A web server framework (actionhero): In CI(Github Actions) we install deps, compile Typescript to JS, test on 3 versions of node, and build docs. 7 min w/ some parallelization https://github.com/actionhero/actionhero/actions/runs/801273...

* A Monorepo (Grouparoo): In CI (CircleCI) we install deps, compile Typescript to JS, run migrations, check licenses, test UIs, CLI tools, Plugins, and try out a few different databases. 5 minutes with rather extreme parallelization https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/grouparoo/grouparo...

Websockets are the answer. Checkout https://www.actionherojs.com/ for a framework that works great as game server.

1: for example - https://demo.actionherojs.com/swagger.html 2: https://github.com/actionhero/actionhero/pull/1671

Wow, if you curl it, there's a lot of boilerplate code there.

Maybe built using Bazel?

https://bazel.build

Bazel by Google

Luckily a feature to limit the disk cache size is in development: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/5139

This is a problem that Bazel (https://bazel.build) solves in a very convenient way. You can just keep using the paths relative to the repository root, and as long as you properly declare your test needs that file it will access it without problems. Or you can use the runfile libraries to access them too.

When doing research for this lab exercise I looked at both vcpkg and conan. Both are package managers that would automate the installation and configuration of my program with its dependencies. However, when it came to releasing and sharing my program my options were limited. For example, the central public registry for conan packages is conan-center, but these packages are curated and the process is very involved. There was no way conan-center would accept a class project like mine. Alternatively, I could host a conan package on a public Artifactory repository, but accessing the package requires users to add the repository to their conan remote. This already sounded like too many steps to expect regular users to follow - I already haven't setup any conan remotes, there's no way I could expect regular users to know about conan remotes, let alone have conan installed on their system. After discussing with people online and consulting my instructor, I ultimately decided to do a GitHub release. However, in the future I was encouraged to look into using CMake or bazel.

NOTE: I won’t mention SBT and Leiningen here because, with all due respect, they are niche build tools. I also won’t discuss Kobalt for the same reason (besides, it’s no longer actively maintained). Additionally, I won’t touch upon Bazel and Buck in this context, mainly because I’m not very familiar with them. If you have insights or comments about these tools, please feel free to share them in the comments 👇

> None of this solves C's only REAL problem (in my opinion) which is the lack of dependency management.

Bazel solves this really nicely, I know some people have strong opinions on it but I cannot recommend it enough

https://bazel.build/