Good job!! Can’t wait to give it a go. Since you started work on this 10 years ago, has anything like it emerged in the Node ecosystem? What is most similar framework to Citizen right now and what makes it different?
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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.
Basically, I wasn't a fan of what was available 10 years ago, so I built what I needed and didn't pay much attention to what others were doing.
One of my fears in sharing it widely was getting a response like, "You're about 5 years late, frameworks X, Y, and Z do all these things already." But based on some of the comments, it seems like citizen offers something that others don't.
What I like about citizen is that it provides enough structure to get started, keep my code organized, and focus on what I'm building as opposed to how, while remaining flexible and hands-on enough for me to feel like I'm actually writing code and not just gluing together everybody else's code.