dapr VS ts-node

Recently, the Dapr maintainers released V1.10 of Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr), a developer framework for building cloud-native applications, making it easier to run multiple microservices on Kubernetes and interact with external state stores/databases, secret stores, pub/sub-brokers, and other cloud services and self-hosted solutions.

Dapr, the open-source distributed application runtime, is often used in event-driven applications. Dapr provides a set of standardized API building blocks that simplify microservice development. By using the Bindings building block, developers can use input, and output bindings, and either trigger their apps or invoke other resources without having to learn resource-specific SDKs for these resources. With Dapr release 1.10, a new binding is provided that allows developers to publish messages to Cloudflare Queues. Because of the common set of APIs that Dapr offers, developers from any background can use the binding to publish messages to Cloudflare Queues without needing to know the Cloudflare SDKs or adding that dependency to their codebase.

Fasthttp on which fiber is based has A LOT of drawbacks and I would not recommend for general usage. Among things we found while analyzing it for Dapr: no request-specific context, no HTTP/2 or HTTP/3, almost no support for streaming, and the occasional bug that can’t be figured out.

One thing that I've seen work is that if you absolutely require the ability to deploy on-prem then using something like OpenShift/Kubernetes as a primitive can work per the parent.

Even if you rely on streaming like PubSub or Kinesis, the trick is to write interfaces in the application tier that allow for using an on-prem primitive like Kafka and not depending too much on the implementation of that abstraction.

I've been on a platform team that built these primitives into the application layer, e.g. a blob storage interface to access any blob store whether it's on prem NFS, azure, etc. However I'm looking at newer projects like dapr [1] and have taken them for a spin in small projects. Such a project seems like a favorable way to add "platform services" to a non-trivial app while still maintaining a pubsub abstraction that allows for swapping out the physical backend.

[1] https://dapr.io/

The full analysis is here, and even though some things are specific to our project, most are generic: https://github.com/dapr/dapr/issues/4979

Furthermore, microservices are often deployed together with service frameworks. For example, Dapr is a popular runtime framework for microservices. It provides a “sidecar” service for each microservice. The microservice accesses the sidecar via the Dapr API to discover and invoke other services on the network, manage state data, and access message queues.

Dapr Runtime v1.9.0

It is starting: Dapr WF engine implementation starter

The command specified in the app option uses ts-node by default, which is an execution engine for Node.js that allows you to run TypeScript code directly. The --prefer-ts-exts flag prevents ts-node from prioritizing precompiled .js files and will always import the TypeScript source code instead, if it is available. This is useful if you are also using tsc (the TypeScript compiler) alongside the app option. The bin/cdk.ts file is the entry point for our CDK app, which defines the main function that will be executed when the app is run.

If you want to write apps that run on Node.js I would suggest using Google’s TypeScript style guide. You can start using it by simply running npx gts init. I’d suggest that you start with this and run your apps using ts-node/ts-node-dev because it does not require an extra build step.

ts-node (“TypeScript execution and REPL for Node.js”)

The process of compiling TypeScript source files into JavaScript code before executing them with Node.js can get a little tedious after a while, especially during development. You can eliminate the intermediate steps before running the program through the ts-node CLI to execute .ts files directly. Go ahead and install the ts-node package using the command below:

I tried suggested solution by https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-node/issues/1007 but this causes problem with NestJS decorators:

Some people prefer to use https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-node with https://www.npmjs.com/package/ts-node-dev.

As highlight, aside from CDK and its construct libraries, ts-node is a TypeScript execution engine and REPL for Node.js. It JIT transforms TypeScript into JavaScript, enabling you to directly execute TypeScript on Node.js without pre-compiling. This is accomplished by hooking node’s module loading APIs, enabling it to be used seamlessly alongside other Node.js tools and libraries.

ts-node is a handy tool for executing Typescript files without having to first compile to Javascript.