Bookshelf VS redwood

Bookshelf.js is an uncomplicated and lightweight ORM designed for Node.js, constructed atop the Knex.js query builder. Its primary aim is to support SQL databases, such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite. Bookshelf.js focuses on simplicity and user-friendliness, offering a direct method for defining models and relationships through JavaScript classes and prototypal inheritance.

If you're set on JS (using only one language on a team/project can be very nice) common choices for backend often involve using Express or hapi with some ORM (like Prisma or Bookshelf).

Strapi uses Bookshelf.js library to send database queries in an ORM fashion. Bookshelf itself is powered by Knex.js, which is a SQL query builder. Knex.js supports popular SQL-based database engines like PostgreSQL, SQLite, MySQL, and MariaDB, which are also supported by Strapi. Knex.js also supports database transactions, which then makes Bookshelf also provides support for it. With a basic understanding of both libraries, we can add Database transaction support to Strapi queries.

I made the transition from LAMP to Node-based stacks 6 or 7 years ago and started out using BookshelfJS. Node is a different world though, one that lends itself to distributed services and server-less infrastructure, and it's changed how I interact with DBs.

First, we need to get all recordsets randomly sorted. To achieve this, we will need to build a query. Strapi is using Bookshelf as an ORM. So we can start by getting our Partnership model, so we can run a query on it. Inside the query, we get a knex (this is the query builder that Bookshelf uses under the hood) query builder instance. On this query builder instance, we can there ask to order recordsets randomly. Let's try this:

A few of the most important characteristics of the solution we wanted was that any documentation-related work had to be easy for developers, and it would ideally be located in proximity to the actual implementing code. Anvil's web application is written in Node, and we chose Apollo as our GraphQL framework and use a modified version of Bookshelf as our ORM.

FYI Currently I use Knex with Bookshelf. Bookshelf is an ORM written by Knex author before TypeORM, Objection... existed. It's not maintained anymore but it works fine and is much better than Sequelize when I've tried.

Frameworks are a theme with this month's Release Radar, so here's another. Redwood is a full-stack, JavaScript/TypeScript web application, designed to scale with you. It uses React frontend for the frontend and links to a custom GraphQL API for the backend. The latest version includes a bunch of breaking changes such as moving to Node 20.0, the Redwood Studio, and highly requested GraphQL features such as Realtime, Fragments, and Trusted Documents, the server file, new router hooks, and heaps more. If you've previously used Redwood, you'll probably want to upgrade to version 7.0. The team have put together a handy migration guide for you to follow.

The other piece of important information to acknowledge here is that when we say RSCs need a framework, “framework” effectively just means “Next.js.” There are some smaller frameworks (like Waku) that support RSCs. There are also some larger and more established frameworks (like Redwood) that have plans to support RSCs or (like Gatsby) only support RSCs in beta. We will likely see this change once we get React 19 and RSCs are part of the Stable version. However, for now, Next.js is currently the only framework recommended in the official React docs that supports server components.

Although there are quite a few opinionated battery-included frameworks that have picked up everything for you like RedwoodJS, Blitz, and Create-T3-App, you still need to choose between them and hope that they will remain mainstream and well-maintained in the future. So how should we choose?

Web development frameworks in JavaScript, such as NextJS and RedwoodJS, have gained popularity among developers. Choosing the right framework, library, or tool for a project is crucial for efficient development. Developers often seek the best tools to save time and avoid reinventing the wheel.

The community here is pretty friendly. https://redwoodjs.com/

Next.js 13 ignited the first wave of attention to React Server Components (RSC) around the end of last year. Over time, other frameworks, like Remix and RedwoodJS, have also started to put RSC into their future road maps. However, the entire "moving computation to the server-side" direction of React/Next.js has been highly controversial from the very beginning.

I'm currently experimenting with the fantastic Redwood framework. However, while going through the excellent tutorial, I didn't find any guidance on using data validation libraries like Yup, Zod, Vest, etc. So, I had to do some investigation and came up with a solution. This article describes the implementation of validation with Zod in a fresh Redwood app. You can find the sources at this github repository.

RBAC is one of the most common authorization models - users are assigned different roles, and resource access privileges are controlled at the role level. Despite its limitations, RBAC is a popular choice for simple applications, and some frameworks (like RedwoodJS) have built-in support for it.

Check it out here: https://redwoodjs.com/