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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Microframeworks
  4. Microframeworks
  5. ExpressJS vs actionhero.js

ExpressJS vs actionhero.js

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

ExpressJS
ExpressJS
Stacks35.1K
Followers24.0K
Votes1.6K
Actionhero
Actionhero
Stacks20
Followers34
Votes21
GitHub Stars0
Forks0

ExpressJS vs actionhero.js: What are the differences?

# Introduction
In this comparison, we will explore the key differences between ExpressJS and actionhero.js.

1. **Routing System**: ExpressJS provides a simple and easy-to-use routing system where developers can define routes using HTTP methods. On the other hand, actionhero.js offers a more robust routing system that includes support for versioned APIs, automatic parameter validation, and route specific details.
   
2. **Built-in Features**: ExpressJS is a minimalist web framework that requires developers to choose and integrate third-party libraries for additional features like authentication, validation, and ORM. In contrast, actionhero.js comes with built-in support for features such as caching, logging, authentication, and task scheduling, reducing the need for external dependencies.

3. **Real-time Capabilities**: ExpressJS is primarily designed for building traditional web applications and APIs, lacking built-in support for real-time features like websockets. On the other hand, actionhero.js is designed with real-time capabilities in mind, providing native support for websockets, chat rooms, and other real-time functionalities.

4. **Structure and Organization**: ExpressJS follows a more traditional MVC structure where developers have to explicitly organize their code into controllers, models, and views. In comparison, actionhero.js follows a more opinionated architecture that promotes code organization through actions, tasks, and initializers, offering a more standardized approach to project structure.

5. **Scalability and Performance**: ExpressJS is known for its lightweight nature and high performance, making it suitable for smaller applications with low to moderate traffic. On the other hand, actionhero.js is optimized for scalability and performance, offering features like distributed pub/sub messaging, cluster support, and horizontal scaling capabilities out of the box.

6. **Extensibility and Customization**: While both frameworks are highly extensible, ExpressJS provides greater flexibility for developers to customize and extend the framework according to their specific needs. In contrast, actionhero.js offers a more opinionated and structured approach to customization, leveraging plugins and extensions to add functionalities in a standardized manner.

In Summary, ExpressJS and actionhero.js differ in their routing system, built-in features, real-time capabilities, structure and organization, scalability and performance, as well as extensibility and customization options.

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Advice on ExpressJS, Actionhero

Tony
Tony

Oct 21, 2020

Review

I personally like using a wholly JS stack, with TypeORM + MySql/Postgres over MongoDb + Mongoose because TypeOrm's Typescript support is much stronger. After developing large projects with Typescript, there is no going back to regular javascript (typings help catch a LOT of errors / maintains data structure !)

Sticking with a javascript stack will allow you to share certain aspects of your application between front and backend. For example: one particularly common feature is to validate API call data and form entry data. Both of these are the same data shape typically (aside from pagination, metadata, etc), and can benefit from a single schema for validation. I use Yup to define this schema, then in the front and back end I can utilize this definition instead of rewriting the same logic in two different languages.

Same goes for certain utility functions such as data structure typings, decryption, encryption, sanitizing inputs, formatting of data, and other utilities. No point of writing these in two languages when both frontend and backend will use them. It will also help reduce developer work load, due to less tests / code to work with.

The only thing you must ensure in your import chain the frontend never imports any secret variables or sensitive logic used by the backend, as that will get bundled into your application. All shared imports should be individual modules

If you want to go one step further, next.js is basically create react app with server side rendering (SSR). This would allow you to skip the annoying step of configuring separate backend and frontend build tools. Might be worth exploring depending on your skill level.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

ExpressJS
ExpressJS
Actionhero
Actionhero

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.

It is a multi-transport #nodejs API Server with integrated cluster capabilities and delayed tasks.

Robust routing;HTTP helpers (redirection, caching, etc);View system supporting 14+ template engines;Content negotiation;Focus on high performance;Executable for generating applications quickly;High test coverage
Easy-to-use actions; Built-in tasks; Cluster-ready; Localization; Routing; Api-first development; File server
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
0
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
0
Stacks
35.1K
Stacks
20
Followers
24.0K
Followers
34
Votes
1.6K
Votes
21
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 381
    Simple
  • 336
    Node.js
  • 244
    Javascript
  • 193
    High performance
  • 152
    Robust routing
Cons
  • 27
    Not python
  • 17
    Overrated
  • 14
    No multithreading
  • 9
    Javascript
  • 5
    Not fast
Pros
  • 6
    Fast
  • 6
    Lightweight
  • 4
    Same API code for many transports (HTTP, Socket, etc)
  • 4
    Clear and declarative routing and controllers
  • 1
    Simple
Cons
  • 1
    Speed
Integrations
Node.js
Node.js
Node.js
Node.js
Redis
Redis
Resque
Resque

What are some alternatives to ExpressJS, Actionhero?

Django REST framework

Django REST framework

It is a powerful and flexible toolkit that makes it easy to build Web APIs.

Sails.js

Sails.js

Sails is designed to mimic the MVC pattern of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the requirements of modern apps: data-driven APIs with scalable, service-oriented architecture.

Sinatra

Sinatra

Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.

Lumen

Lumen

Laravel Lumen is a stunningly fast PHP micro-framework for building web applications with expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development must be an enjoyable, creative experience to be truly fulfilling. Lumen attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as routing, database abstraction, queueing, and caching.

Slim

Slim

Slim is easy to use for both beginners and professionals. Slim favors cleanliness over terseness and common cases over edge cases. Its interface is simple, intuitive, and extensively documented — both online and in the code itself.

Fastify

Fastify

Fastify is a web framework highly focused on speed and low overhead. It is inspired from Hapi and Express and as far as we know, it is one of the fastest web frameworks in town. Use Fastify can increase your throughput up to 100%.

Falcon

Falcon

Falcon is a minimalist WSGI library for building speedy web APIs and app backends. We like to think of Falcon as the Dieter Rams of web frameworks.

hapi

hapi

hapi is a simple to use configuration-centric framework with built-in support for input validation, caching, authentication, and other essential facilities for building web applications and services.

TypeORM

TypeORM

It supports both Active Record and Data Mapper patterns, unlike all other JavaScript ORMs currently in existence, which means you can write high quality, loosely coupled, scalable, maintainable applications the most productive way.

FeathersJS

FeathersJS

Feathers is a real-time, micro-service web framework for NodeJS that gives you control over your data via RESTful resources, sockets and flexible plug-ins.

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