rapid-rest

Minimal overhead NodeJS REST server.

Insprired by the amazing throughput of NodeJS but dissappointed by the overhead of the available libraries I decided to hone my own.

There is a performance review available on codeproject review

The test suite is available on github at rest-stress

Installation and Usage

Install rapid-rest with npm

npm install rapid-rest 

The following call should be placed on your web facing server page.

var routes = require('rapid-rest')();

##Syntax The syntax is wholesale copy of the node-rest project which seems to have lost some of it's steam plus some smatterings of other REST syntaxes that I've used along the way.

Example 1:

Accept a GET request that has a single parameter in the path

routes('/there/:over_name')
    ('get', function(req, res, params){
         alert("You requested:" + params.over_name);
    });
routes.listen(port);

Example 2:

Accept a POST request with multiple parameter in the path

routes('/here/:here_name/:user')
    ('post', function(req, res, params, data){
         alert("You sent:" + JSON.stringify(data) + " to " +  params.here_name  + " for user: " + params.user);
    });

Example 3:

Accept a DELETE request with parameters defined in the path and with multiple required querystring parameters.

routes('/there/:where?here_name={here_name}&user={user}')
     ('delete', function(req, res, params){
          alert("You're deleting:" + params.where + " where here_name is " +  req.query.here_name  
                           + ", for user: " + req.query.user)
      });

##Fixes and feature updates June 17/2013

1) Added options argument when intializing rapidRest which means that clustering is now supported out of the box which means that I'm almost nearly pretty confident about this version being production ready.

var rapidRest = require('rapid-rest');
var routes = rapidRest({allocateCPUs: require('os').cpus().length});

2) Avoids catastrophic socket errors by silently trapping request errors and letting the current worker process die naturally.

3) Handles empty request body.

May 24th/2013

1) Route add method supports CaseInsensitivity disabling.

routes('/PATH/:but_not_pAth, true) ('post', /*** handler for URLs containing "/PATH" ***/);

2) To simplify the handler code, the query collection is copied to the params collection. So be sure to not use the same name for defining parameters in the path as those that are in the queryString.

3) Supports path starts-with using '^' character

routes('^/PATH/:but_not_pAth, true) ('post', /*** handler for URLs starting with "/PATH" ***/);

##Future development

• Allow integration with middleware such as connect or express
• More tests