perfectapi

Package Goal

The goals of this package are to support:

• Well-designed APIs (easy to use, scales well, easy to extend, etc)
• Simple usage of any API from any programming language. (Its pretty easy already, but we make it even easier)
• Full support for running an API as a service on Linux and Windows operating systems
• Simplicity of development for both API authors and consumers

Reasons to use PerfectAPI (Current Feature list)

• You want to expose an API using Node.js, or you want to make an existing Node.js module accessible as a remote service API
• You care about performance - 4 times faster than node-restify
• Easily create a self-hosted server with command-line - myapp server -p 3002
• Support for easy configuration via environment variables
• Awesomely amazing test page for your users to learn/experiment/test your API, e.g. amigen api test page
• Windows and Linux installers (run your API as a true service on your server) - myapp install myappservicename
• Automatic validation of required parameters (no need to code boring validation)
• Local command-line access to your API
• Built-in JSONP interface to your API - that means you can access it using JavaScript from another domain
• REST-like interface to your API
• Native .NET client to your API - access from .NET without dealing with REST, JSON, WebRequest etc.
• Built-in support for max-age and etag server caching - lowers your costs by doing less work

Is it Perfect?

No. See the FAQ

Install

The usual for Node.js stuff

$ npm install perfectapi

or for a global install:

$ sudo npm install -g perfectapi

How to include in your API

First, create a perfectapi.json configuration file. See Configuration File for details. Once you have a configuration file, a sample usage is:

#!/usr/bin/env node

var perfectapi = require('perfectapi');  
var path = require('path');

var configPath = path.resolve(__dirname, 'perfectapi.json');
var parser = new perfectapi.Parser();

//handle the commands
parser.on("mycommand", function(config, callback) {
    //do mycommand code, putting results into "result" object

    //after done
    callback(err, result);
});
 
parser.on("anothercommand", function(config, callback) {
    //do anothercommand code, putting results into "result" object

    //after done
    callback(err, result);
});

//expose the api
module.exports = parser.parse(configPath);

In your package.json file, be sure to specify the above file as a "bin", so that the app can be called from the command-line, e.g.

{ "name": "myNodeLib"
, "version": "0.0.1"
, "description": "My brilliant API"
, "main": "./bin/myNodeLib.js"
, "bin": "./bin/myNodeLib.js"
, "engines": {
    "node" : ">=0.6.5"
  }
, "dependencies": {
    "perfectapi": ">=0.0.13"
  }
}

Thats it.

See the website and wiki for more info.