JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

In my previous blog post, I have introduced Koa.js, a new framework building Node.js apps, by leveraging harmony (ECMAScript 6) features of JavaScript. In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to write a web app in Koa.js with basic CRUD functionalities. The source code of the demo web app is available on Github.

In order to working with Koa.js, you must install Node 0.11.9 or higher for JavaScript generator support. After installing Node 0.11.9 or higher, you can install Koa.js using npm.

Koa is a minimalist framework and does not bundled with middleware, so that Koa itself, does not provide routing infrastructure. To use routing for Koa, you can use koa-route, which is a simple route middleware for Koa.

We wanted to have something that renders our content on the server-side at the first load, but provides the experience of the SPA applications after that. 
We needed something that can render both on the client and server side and share the application state between the two sides. So the client should continue from the point where the server finished its job. 
To implement this kind of architecture the code base has to be common on the server and client side (Browserify/Webpack) and the application also has to be able to render on both sides.