Geddy

Geddy is a new web framework for Node.js that aims to be a more full-featured than Express. Like Express, Geddy has DSL for routing and support for templates and partials. Where Geddy goes further, is in implementing an ORM (inspired by the Datamapper and SQLAlchemy APIs) and a full system of Rails-style code generators. Geddy also supports RESTful architectures with its content negotiation system. Express has this as well, but Geddy adds some sugar.

If you’re familiar at all with the Ruby web development ecosystem, it probably makes the most sense to think of Express more like a souped-up Sinatra, and Geddy as being further along towards Rails.

At the top of my wish list for a framework like Geddy would be the ability to swap out the ORM-layer for another solution (if I wanted to use Mongo, for instance, or if I preferred a more ActiveRecord-like API). It’s early days for Geddy though, so this is something that could be coming in a future version.

Server-Side Console.log

The console is an indispensable tool for debugging Javascript, but mobile browsers have extremely limited console support. To name but one drawback, there’s no way to easily inspect the contents of an object logged to the console. This can be a huge headache when you’re working on a mobile app. Fortunately, Yahoo!’s David Calhoun (my former cube-mate) has created a simple solution: Server-side Console.log. Just include the JS file in the project you’re developing, add the PHP code to your server, and you’re good to go. Write console.log statements in your Javascript as you normally would, and the log messages will be written to a file on your server. The best part is that all of the objects you log will be expanded (only one level, but that’s already way more useful than the mobile browsers’ consoles). This is such a simple idea, but it’s so totally useful. If you’re doing any mobile Javascript development, do yourself a favor and start using this right now.

“Or so they say…”

“Or so they say…” is a great HTML5 Canvas and audio demo by Mr. doob. But while it’s certainly an impressive achievement in its own right, I’d like to call attention the tools that Mr. doob used in building it. You might recall doob as one of the developers behind “The WIlderness Downtown”, the Google/Arcade Fire music video/tech demo (if you haven’t seen it, go watch it right now). Well, in his post about “Or so they say…”, doob links to his three.js library for 3D rendering, and to the sequencer he built, both of which were used in “The Wilderness Downtown”.

Also, if you want a little bit of explanation about how these libraries are actually used in these projects, check out Brad Neuberg’s post over at Ajaxian.