Use our chat to get help or discuss general topics about REST App.
REST App is an SEO-friendly, fully configured, modular starter project for developing Universal JavaScript applications. You can use REST App to create your applications in JavaScript or TypeScript for all major platforms – mobile, web, and server.
REST App is built with [REST], React, React Native, Expo, Knex.js, and Express with support for relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite.
TypeScript is our language of choice and we use it across the entire project. However, you can freely mix vanilla JavaScript (the ES6 and ES7 syntax) and TypeScript when creating your modules.
REST App also integrates Twitter Bootstrap, Ant Design, Ant Design Mobile, and NativeBase to provide great possibilities for styling for your web and mobile applications.
- Great productivity thanks to live reload and (partial) hot code reload
- Fractal modular architecture that's easy to support and extend
- The possibility to create modules in TypeScript and JavaScript at the same time
- No need to develop typical features for your applications
- Zero project configuration thanks to Zen, a builder for JavaScript projects
- Your team will be able to reuse the code for all the platforms
- Your team can create client, server, and mobile JavaScript applications
- Your application will be easier to support and evolve thanks to the fractal modular architecture
- Your application will be based on a widely-used JavaScript ecosystem (it's easy to find JS developers)
- Your team can develop new features straightaway instead of creating the basic features
Developing client-server-mobile projects in JavaScript never was a trivial task. Not only do you have to spend time installing the application dependencies and configuring them, but you're also constrained to implement many basic functionalities over and over again. And you never have time to develop a starter codebase that you can reuse across all of your projects.
To relieve you from the burden of configuring the project, developing the application structure, and implementing typical features, we created REST App.
REST App provides you with a client-server-mobile application that you can employ as a foundation for developing new web or mobile projects using popular tools from the JavaScript ecosystem. But our app does so much more than just creating a mix of popular JS technologies — it's powered by a few custom libraries and solutions to simplify managing project configurations, creating new modules, building REST API, and perform many other tasks.
One such solution that helps to configure and build REST App-based projects is Zen, a custom build tool that configures the project for all the platforms — web, server, and mobile. With Zen, we drastically reduced the amount of errors caused by third-party libraries used for building JavaScript projects.
REST App also consists of many modules that you can augment and adapt to develop your specific application. Also, you can use those prebuilt modules as a reference when implementing basic features for your applications even if you create them using other technologies.
Among all the approaches to building the application architecture, we opt for the disposable fractal-based modular architecture. Thanks to this approach, it's possible to remove any built-in module from REST App without breaking the application. We recommend that you develop your custom modules with the same idea in mind when using our app.
To learn more about the features and modules available in REST App, follow to the dedicated section Features and Modules.
You can try out the latest version of REST App deployed on Heroku. If you want to see the mobile React Native application in action, check out this demo on Expo.io.
Verify if you use Node.js 6.x or higher (Node.js ^10 is recommended) before running the starter kit.
- Clone the master branch of REST App.
git clone https://github.com/sysgears/restapp.git
cd restapp
NOTE: If you're going to use Windows to develop with REST App, you need to additionally enable symlinks before you run the project.
For Windows 10:
- Press
Win+Ito open Settings - Click Update & Security
- Click the For Developers tab
- In the Use developer features window, switch to Developer Mode
- Install the dependencies. Make sure that you use Yarn 1.0.0 or higher.
yarn
You can use NPM instead of Yarn to handle the dependencies and to run scripts. Throughout the REST App documentation, we'll always use Yarn.
- Seed sample data to the database. The command below will create new tables with sample data in SQLite:
yarn seed
SQLite is a typical default relational database installed in most Linux distributions including Mac OS X; otherwise, consult SQLite installation guide.
- Run the project in development mode:
yarn watch
The server application will be running on http://localhost:3000, while the client application will be running on http://localhost:8080. The terminal will tell your the exact ports.
For more information about running REST App for mobile development, consult the Getting Started guide.
The project structure presents generally accepted guidelines and patterns for building scalable web and mobile applications.
The structure is fractal meaning the available functionality is grouped primarily by feature rather than by file type. But the current structure isn't prescriptive, and you can change it however you like.
restapp
├── config # Various application configurations
├── docs # Documentation
├── node_modules # Global Node.js modules
├── modules # All the prebuilt project modules
├── packages # Available packages
│ ├── client # React client
│ ├── common # Common code
│ ├── mobile # React Native mobile client
│ └── server # Node.js and Express server
└── tools # All build and CLI-related files
Inside modules, you'll find all the prebuilt modules that REST App comes with. Each module under
modules contains sub-directories with module implementations for different technologies. For example, if you look up
the module modules/core, you'll see the following sub-modules:
restapp
├── modules # Available packages
│ ├── core # The core module
│ ├── client-react # Core functionality for React app
│ ├── client-react-native # Core functionality for React Native app
│ ├── common # React Native mobile client
│ └── server-ts # Core functionality for Express server
└── tools # All build and CLI-related files
Follow to the documentation concerning different aspects of how to run, configure, and develop with REST App.
- Getting Started
- Running REST App with Docker
- Deploying REST App to Production
- Configuring REST App
- Features and Modules
- Writing Code
- Available Scripts
Tools
- Gitter channel – ask questions, find answers, and participate in general discussions
- GitHub issues – submit issues and send feature requests
- Wiki – read documentation for the usage scenarios of the starter kit; edit the documentation
The SysGears team provides comprehensive support for commercial partners. Our team can guide you when you're using REST App to build your application.
You can contact us via Skype or email info@sysgears.com.
Copyright © 2016-2019 SysGears (Cyprus) Limited. This source code is licensed under the MIT license.