Shiju Varghese's Blog

My team at Marlabs, developed and released a sample reference web app for the Microsoft ASP.NET stack, named “SocialGoal” . SocialGoal is a social networking web app for socializing your goals and strategies with people. People can create goals and can be shared across the network of SocialGoal users. This app is built with ASP.NET MVC 5, EF 6 Code First, AutoMapper, Autofac, Twitter Bootstrap and following Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Domain Driven Design (DDD). The first drop of the application is available on github at https://github.com/MarlabsInc/SocialGoal. A release note is available in the docs folder of the project repository. The primary objective of the SocialGoal app is to provide a learning app for building real-world web apps with ASP.NET MVC 5 and EF 6 Code First.

A while ago, I blogged about Git Source Control Integration in Windows Azure Mobile Services which lets the developers use Git for working with Mobile Services scripts. The source control integration lets you easily work as a team for working on Mobile Services scripts. This options lets Node.js developers more flexibility and control on the Windows Azure Mobile Services scripts, as you can install npm modules for your Windows Azure Mobile Services. But, this source control integration, had lack of support for package.json so that we had been inconvenient, while working with version controls. In fact, Node.js developers ignore node_modules from source controls and will be installed npm modules using npm install command which will identify dependencies from package.json and will automatically install npm modules.

In this blog post, I will take a look at Windows Azure VM Depot, and how to create Virtual Machines in Windows Azure by using cross platform command line tool, Azure CLI based on the deployment script provided by VM Depot.

In my previous blog post, I have introduced Koa.js, a new framework building Node.js apps, by leveraging harmony (ECMAScript 6) features of JavaScript. In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to write a web app in Koa.js with basic CRUD functionalities. The source code of the demo web app is available on Github. For the sake of the demo, the web app uses an array object as a data store for persistence, but the demo app will be re-write with MongoDB as a persistence storage and will be update on Github. The demo web app uses the following npm modules:

I have been following the Node.js platform since 2011 and had been observed that it was difficult to maintain full-fledged web apps on the production servers, mainly due to the lack of error handling capabilities with callback hells. I have been recommending Node.js for building REST APIs and mobile backends and had been feared about developing complex web apps on the production environments.  I have been using Express.js as an application framework building apps, and at the same time, I was looking for a better web application framework. Last year, I had evaluated DerbyJS and MeteorJS. I was bit interested on DerbyJS last year, but the pace of the development of Derby framework was not good. But last month, I have super excited after the initial release of Koa.js. Initially, the most interesting fact was the team behind the framework. Koa was developed by the same time who has created the most popular Node.js framework, Express. TJ Holowaychuk, who is the most prolific author of Node.js modules, is leading the Koa project.

I did a presentation titled “Building Mobile Backends with Windows Azure Mobile Services” at the Kerala Microsoft user group. In this session, I demonstrated how we can use Windows Azure Mobile Services as the backend for mobile applications with the power of Cloud.

I did a presentation titled “JavaScript, Meet Cloud: Node.js on Windows Azure” at the Kerala JavaScript user group. The goal of the session, was to demonstrate the capabilities of JavaScript, as a programming language on the Cloud, for building server-side applications and Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS). In he session, I had demonstrated Windows Azure as a Cloud platform for building Node.js apps and Mobile backend services.