StreamUR

StreamUR is a stream manipulation platform built on node.

Streams can be conventional file/audio/video but also higher level streams such as twitter feeds.

StreamUR provides filters to convert streams to different types, to combine several streams into one.

Installation

$ npm install streamur

Example: An Asset Manager

A simple example to demonstrate what streamUR can do is to build a powerful asset manager, easily allowing to combine, minify and gzip javascript and css files for serving to the browser.

Use the streamur.stream method to create new streams that map to your resources.

Example:

var streamur = require('streamur');
 
//register a few streams:
streamur.stream("jquery", "https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.js");
streamur.stream("myscript", __dirname+"/public/js/myscript.js");
 
//Use as a connect/express middleware
app.use('/assets/', streamur());

You can then fetch the following 'files':

• /assets/jquery.myscript.js, which will be the combination of both files
• /assets/jquery.myscript.min.js, same as above but the files are minified.
• /assets/jquery.myscript.min.gzip.js, same as above, but the minified files are gziped.

StreamUR revolves around two core concepts: streams ('jquery' and 'myscript') that are user defined and processors ('.', 'min', 'gzip' and 'js') that are provided.

Other uses

That is great for managing your assets but there is more StreamUR can do for you. For instance the jslint processors runs the JSLINT tool on the javscript code and presents the results:

/assets/myscript.jslint.json

But JSON is not very nice to read. To get a nicer view of the results, you can use the prettyjslint processor that returns HTML:

/assets/myscript.prettyjslint.html

There are other useful processors that can be used, see the full list below.

Streams

Register streams by calling the streamur.stream(name, locator) method.

name is that descriptor used for that stream and must be alphanumeric.

locator is the path at which this stream can be found. It may be an absolute file path or a URL.

Example:

streamur.stream("jquery", "https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.js");
streamur.stream("myscript", __dirname+"/public/js/myscript.js");

Processors

There are a number of processors that apply to different types of streams, and more are in development, stay tuned!

General Purpose Processors

dot (.)

The concatination processor. It groups streams together and chains them to the next processor.

gzip

Gzips the stream and sets the proper header on the response. Uses gzip.

Javascript Processors

min

Minifies javascript code using uglifyjs.

jslint

Runs JSLINT on the stream and returns the result as raw JSON.

prettyjslint

Runs JSLINT on the stream and formats the results in HTML format.

highlight

Highlights Javascript code in the stream using highlight. Returns HTML

CSS Processors

mini

Minifies css code using clean-css.

Header Processors

nocache

Sets No-cache headers on the response, telling the client that the resource should not be cached.

html

Sets the response's content type as HTML.

js

Sets the response's content type as Javascript.

json

Sets the response's content type as JSON.

css

Sets the response's content type as CSS.

Aliases

Aliases are useful to shorten the names of resources (such as when many streams are concatenated together).

There are three different ways to create an alias:

a. Using streamur.alias(name, expression). Example:

streamur.alias('scripts', 'jquery.underscore.myscript1.myscrip2.min');

You can then request scripts.gzip.js which would yield an identical result as jquery.underscore.myscript1.myscrip2.min.gzip.js.

b. Using streamur.alias(name, function). Example:

streamur.alias('scripts', function(alias){
    alias.stream("jquery", __dirname+"/public/js/jquery-1.7.2.js");
    alias.stream("myscript", __dirname+"/public/js/myscript.js");	
});

Request scripts would be identical to jquery.myscript, and the myscript and jquery streams are also created.

c. Using streamur.aliasDirectory(name, path), where path is the name of the folder containing all the files to be created as streams and made part of the alias. Example:

streamur.aliasDirectory('global', __dirname+"/assets/global")

In this case, all files in the directory will be made streams. The name of each stream will be the file name, only keeping alphanumeric characters. In some rare cases, this may result in stream name collision.

The streams will be concatenated in their alphabetical order in the directory. Therefore, this method is not recommended for grouping javascript files that have interdependencies.

Caching

StreamUR caches the result of each script access. This is important especially as some processors are CPU intensive and take a long time to complete (e.g. min). If you use StreamUR in production, it is recommended that each resource is accessed at least once after server startup to populate the cache.

StreamUR will invalidate the cache if it detects that any of the underlying streams have been modified. This is useful during development, so that the server does not need to be restarted after each update.

Warning: Cache invalidation relies on Node's fs.watch method which is currently not available on all platforms.

License

Source code is licenced under The MIT License.

Contributors

This project was initially developped for the Summer Blast-off Hackathon, Saturday, June 23, 2012.

git-summary:

project  : streamUR
repo age : 13 days ago
active   : 9 days
commits  : 188
files    : 26
authors  : 
  106	Julien Dreux            56.4%
   37	Thomas Getgood          19.7%
   32	Stephen R. Hamilton     17.0%
   12	ben-zen                 6.4%
    1	jdreux                  0.5%