Node.js Framework for API development, AquaJS gives its users the opportunity to develop an app in a quick and organized way by taking care of connection points between existing popular frameworks and solving common integration problems.
Open source framework, AquaJS is built on top of the Express Node.js Web application framework to support microservice design principles. In an article about the AquaJS framework Venkatachalam Rangasamy, senior software architect at Equinix wrote that Equinix’s main goal is to enable developers “to focus on writing reusable application or business logic, instead of spending time building software infrastructure (framework and modules).”
Among its features are:
Deployable, small, modular services.
Orchestration engine for service discovery.
YAML based API scaffolding through Command line interface.
Build, Ship and Run your App.
Test Driven Enforcement with auto stub skeleton and imposters.
Collecting, tracking and storing application logs.
AquaJS can reduce effort with automatic scaffolding and minimum learning curve, can improve quality by giving a complete support for test driven development, involves less code as it comes bundled with chosen module from millions, and provides an isolated development environment by building, shipping, and running AquaJS anywhere using docker.
Grouped into three sections: microservice, orchestrator and plug-ins, AquaJS developers, according to Rangasamy, can extend the capabilities of the framework by loading plug-ins as all core features of AquaJS are developed as plug-ins and can be extended.
“The framework also provides Microservice/API catalog. AquaJS scaffolding generates api-doc endpoints as described in the YAML. Using swagger, users can try out the API endpoints in just a couple of clicks,” according to Rangasamy.
AquaJS can speed up performance by doubling the requests per second, uses 60% less resources compared to Java, has 50% fewer code lines with 40% fewer files for code base, and can build microservices and focus on business logic 2 times faster when there are fewer people involved.
Among professionals with huge backgrounds that do support the framework of AquaJS with JavaScript microservices there are different opinions that shed a light into some of the framework’s problems. "It's focused on microservices, which is Node’s sweet spot so that's nice. They mention in their documentation in a few places that they favor convention over configuration, which is great if the convention is something that works for you. And if not, then it can be a little bit frustrating, Npm inventor Isaac Schlueter said for InfoWorld.