Now that my design as been done with the swagger format, I’ll start the coding with LoopBack.
Apigee-127
Before deciding to use loopback, my first attempt was with Apigee-127. The framework was easy to use until I realized that while the API Gateway is written using pure node.js code, the favorite choice of implementation is the apache usergrid BaaS Framework.
Since apache usergrid is writting in Java EE stack and not a pure node.js implementation I have to eliminate it.
Feathers 2.0
After that, I tried the feathers 2.0 framework. Very modular, the framework is writting using pure node.js code. After searching a little bit on the internet and the slack channel for the framework, I didn’t find any hooks that can bridge the swagger 2.0 yaml format to the service implementation. The people working to build this framework were very kind in answering my questions.
I found it difficult to find examples and to write a complete working API with it. I’m not a node expert too so I stopped my exploration for now but I promise to go back and give it a try later.
Loopback
The loopback framework is well documented and as a lot of examples available, easier to start with than Apigee-127 and Feathers 2.0 so I started with this one (on my third try).
Creating the application
Creating the application was easy :
Generating a model based on my swagger definition
The built-in Swagger generator makes it easy to do the job.
I’ve made a local copy of my swagger definition in the api directory of my project with the name words-swagger.yaml and generated the model :
Running the project
The included generator as a little bug in the version that I used :
The same bug appeared at a few places that I fixed easily.
The generated API
My swagger definition included a model and a list of API that I created to have some basics CRUD operations on my model. I
didn’t realize when I used the swagger-generator that it had the capacity to automatically generate the CRUD operations so I
ended up with two sets of API.
The swagger_v1 API :
The WordList API :
My first learning
I’ve learned an interesting feature about the loopback framework and the swagger format. Since we have the ability to define a model, there is not added value in defining the API for some basics CRUD operations.
I will modify my swagger format to reflect that and continue on my API project.