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I'm new to ExpressJS. I want to create API's for my service which will be consumed directly by other servers and also a part of it by mobile apps/browsers. I just discovered Restify, Node-PerfectAPI, Node-APIServer and I don't know what the differences are.
Can someone kindly elaborate on the differences of each framework and the advantages/disadvantages.
Why would one choose Express/NodeJS vs. Other Frameworks for creating API'S?
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NodeJS is an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model using JavaScript as its main language. It helps to build scalable network applications. Express is a minimal and flexible Node. js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.
It is unmaintainedExpress has not been updated for years, and its next version has been in alpha for 6 years. People may think it is not updated because the API is stable and does not need change.
restify is a node. js module purpose built to create REST web services in Node. restify makes lots of the hard problems of building such a service, like versioning, error handling and content-negotiation easier.
Disclaimer: I am the author of node-perfectapi.
The focus of perfectapi is to make it simple for the developer to go from start to production-ready. It is more abstracted than node-restify. The impact of that is you have less flexibility in the design of your API, but at the same time, you should be able to get something production-ready much quicker, with less expertise.
Both restify and perfectapi have comparable performance.
The links in this answer go to pages that highlight the benefits of each solution.
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I'm also working on a similar issue. One of the main difference that may interest you is the performance. I just found a blog post from the developer of "perfect-api" comparing his framework to the 2 others. http://blog.perfectapi.com/2012/benchmarking-apis-using-perfectapi-vs-express.js-vs-restify.js/
A comment states that Restify is doing much better now.
From my (limited) experience, I would say that express.js is easier to use than Restify and provides some nice tools as connect.js which is exposed. For example, this will avoid you the pain of writing a static file server even thought Connect can still be integrated with Restify.
On the other hand, Restify will make some common API tasks much easier. For example, it provides a throttle engine along with an API conversioning system which is really necessary in an environment where you deal with clients you do not control.
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You should also consider https://npmjs.org/package/hapi
It looks very promising. There's a talk about the framework in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Recv7vR8ZlA where the main contributor to hapi talks about what makes an API framework tick.
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