JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Techy is a flat CMS based on Node.js and Markdown. I made it because I wanted to write my articles in Markdown format and avoid the time-consuming publishing workflow which I’ve been using. This post will cover a little bit about how why I created the project, how it works and how you can use it.

The idea is simple. We write Markdown files and by running the techy command in the terminal these files are converted to beautifully looking HTML pages. The final result of this article could be seen here. The home page of the blog looks like that...

Handy provides all the basic functionality of a web app freeing you to focus on the features that make your app truly unique.

Out of the box user account management

• Account registration
• User authentication - login / logout
• Password reset
• Email address verification

Dead simple content management

• Define new content types
• Save or retrieve content from the database
• Delete content
• Publish or unpublish content
• Rate content

Easy role based access control

• Assign roles to users
• Grant access permissions
• Check user permissions to access resources
• Manage permissions with a graphical UI

One of the biggest benefits to building a single page app (SPA) is the ability to host flat files, rather than needing to build and service a back-end infrastructure.

However, most of the applications that we will build need to be powered by a back-end server with custom data. There are a growing number of options to enable us developers to focus on building only our front-end code and leave the back-ends alone.

Amazon released a new option for us late last week to allow us to build server-less web applications from right inside the browser: Amazon AWS Javascript SDK.

Their browser-based (and server-side with NodeJS) SDK allows us to confidently host our applications and interact with production-grade back-end services.

Now, it’s possible to host our application stack entirely on Amazon infrastructure, using S3 to host our application and files, DynamoDB as a NoSQL store, and other web-scale services. We can even securely accept payments from the client side and get all the benefits of the Amazon CDN.

With this release, the Javascript SDK now allows us to interact with 5 of the dozens of Amazon AWS services. These five services are:

* DynamoDB
* Simple Notification Service (SNS)
* Simple Queue Service (SQS)
* Simple Storage Service (S3)
* Security Token Service (STS)