Skip to main content

Review: Nestjs - Finally a scalable way to build APIs

I have been thinking about this for a long time. There HAS to be a defined way to build APIs in a scalable way. 

If you have used Node, Express, etc in your side projects, you might have felt that after a point in development, debugging truly becomes a pain. Sure, enterprise-level API codes are great. But a lot of times, these configurations are too much, and probably not even needed in other projects. To be honest, I haven't seen a lot of Open-Source API codes either to make a judgement on how experienced developers build their APIs.


Anyway, I came across an amazing framework recently, and I think if you are coding a complex API, this should be your way to go.

Nest.js

Nest.js is a framework for building efficient, reliable and scalable server-side applications. 

You essentially break your APIs into controllers, services, and modules, which allow you to modularize the smallest of functionalities in your endpoints or the API as a whole.

Why is modularizing important?

As I have talked about in my previous blogs, 2 main reasons include easier debugging and better code readability. Of course, not to forget re-using same codes as functions is one of the most basic rules of programming.

Reasons to choose

  • Your code is finally scalable in the right sense.
  • Without thinking too much, you have created actual re-usable functional components that interact with DB and isolated them with the endpoints (controllers).

Cons:

The only disadvantage I found is that debugging in this framework is a little abstracted. This is because, although you write your code in TypeScript, it is compiled and built into simple JS code. Quite often, the exact file and line of the bug in your code might not be that easy to figure out if it's a runtime error.

But I won't say that it's purely Nest's disadvantage. 

Nevertheless, given the benefits of TypeScript and Nest together, the debugging con isn't too much. It's not like you just cannot debug your code! 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"Hey Google" get me a new T-shirt

Everyone loves Google for its amazing technology and creative workspaces! Guess what? Google loves its developers as much as the world loves it too! And yeah, you don't need to be an amazing programmer to be a developer in Google's community. All you need to do is to spare 30 minutes, just once, and maybe have some creativity! That's it! Oh, and you should be really checking your mails periodically, although if you don't currently have this habit, your excitement would develop that for you. What do we want? So you arrived here to know about getting a T-shirt. Would you also like having a Google Home ? Yup, that is also something you could get through this. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, an entry to Google's Developers Community Program! There're a lot of perks for it but let's first talk business. What do we have to do? In a nutshell: Make an Action for Google Assistant .  But what's an Action ? Action is a feature, or a sub-applicat...

Namaste JavaScript Quick Notes

Note:  Akshay Saini's Namaste JavaScript is probably the best course for JavaScript developers out there. These are my personal notes that I made while watching the course; they serve more of as an online quick reference for my understanding and revision, and I hope it benefits anyone reading it too! Everything in JS happens inside an Execution Context. Before a JS code is run, memory is allocated and variables are set as undefined   , and functions are set as their exact code in the scope within the Execution Context. The global execution context hosts all the global variables and function definitions. An Execution Context has 2 components: Memory, that stores variables and functions; and Code, that reads and executes the code. Call Stack maintains the order of execution contexts. Since JS is single threaded and asynchronous, at one point of time, only one function is executed which is at the top of the call stack. For each function, an execution context is created before ex...

My JEE Story that taught me Life

It was May 2015. I'd come out of school and finished what looked like the final hurdle to life at that time - the Board Examinations! Now it was time to rock the world & achieve everything that I used to dream of as a kid. Time to think what's next. I was always ambitious and understood the close link between struggle and success, and I was ready to take trouble for it. There was just one problem though, I didn't know what field to struggle in. So after many advices and discussions, I found out about a tag called 'IIT'  and how it can differentiate a person from any other normal engineer. Great, I'll be an IITian, I exclaimed! So what do I need to do to get into IIT? You need to give an exam called the Joint Entrance Examination ( JEE) . "So that's what I'm going to do." I must say that today, when I look back, I feel extremely grateful for not being forced down a profession which my parents thought was better for me. I've seen ...