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82 points jaysylvester | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source

Citizen is a web application framework I started building years ago when I was first learning Node. I've added features and improved stability/performance continuously and finally decided it was worthy of 1.0 status.

I think it might appeal to devs like me (old guys) who came up on app servers like ColdFusion, .NET, PHP, etc. and prefer the server do the heavy lifting. It doesn't dictate anything about your front end, and instead tries to be as flexible as possible in providing whatever output the client might need, whether it's a single fully-rendered HTML view, partials, JSON, or plain text.

Only 2 direct dependencies for terminal commands (commander) and file watching (chokidar). Built-in functionality includes zero-configuration server-side routing, session management, key/value store (cache rendered views, controller actions, objects, and static files), simple directives for managing cookies, sessions, redirects, and caches, and more.

It's been in continuous use on at least one site that receives hundreds of thousands of page views per month, running months at a time without the process crashing. Fairly stable.

Appreciate any comments/feedback/contributions.

1. accrual ◴[] No.41863708[source]
This is really cool! I cut my web development teeth on LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) and MVC was my favorite pattern to implement. I appreciate how it breaks out each concern into its own folder or files and gives the developer control over the details like session management. For small projects I still find it fun and comfortable to write web apps this way.
replies(1): >>41864864 #
2. jaysylvester ◴[] No.41864864[source]
Thanks!

"Fun" and "comfortable" haven't applied to web dev for a long time in my opinion, and my preference is to keep it as simple and enjoyable as possible.