A powerful framework designed to bring structure and reliability to NoSQL databases. It provides a cohesive layer that sits between your application and your database, helping you define, validate, and transform data in an environment that is typically schema-less. By providing a programmatic approach to data management, DocStack helps you build robust, maintainable, and scalable applications with confidence.
Why DocStack?
In the world of NoSQL, data consistency can be a major challenge. Without a predefined schema, data can become disorganized, leading to frustrating bugs and increased development overhead. DocStack solves this by providing a programmatic way to enforce order. It lets you define clear, class-based representations of your data, ensuring that all incoming and outgoing data adheres to your rules. This structured approach not only helps you maintain data integrity but also simplifies data transformations and the application of business logic.
How DocStack Works
At its core, DocStack operates as a middleware, handling the heavy lifting of data management for you. You start by defining your data models using DocStack’s core classes. From there, you connect these models to a database using an adapter. The framework currently provides a robust adapter for PouchDB (specifically its Node.js adapter), with planned support for MongoDB and Firebase Firestore in the future.
Once connected, you can interact with your data directly through the model classes. DocStack takes care of the validation, transformation, and communication with the database behind the scenes.
DocStack is built with a distributed architecture in mind, with both a server-side implementation and a client-side version that leverages IndexedDB. This allows client instances to pull data from a server, acting as a local synchronization point to ensure consistency. This architecture also lays the groundwork for a future feature where multiple server instances can work together to handle requests in a team. For intensive tasks, the framework uses Web Workers to offload demanding operations like data model propagation, ensuring a smooth user experience.
Key Features and Security
DocStack is built with an event-driven architecture, enabling you to build responsive systems by triggering actions based on data changes. For rapid development, it can also provision a REST API automatically from your data models using an Express-based system, significantly reducing boilerplate code.
Security is a core consideration in DocStack’s design. The server-side implementation includes robust cryptography, and the client-side framework supports data encryption. For key management, you can either provide your own keys to a third-party service like Firebase Auth or leverage new web standards like WebAuthn to securely store cryptographic keys on the user’s host machine.
To assist with development and administration, DocStack provides a dedicated workbench application. This tool offers a visual interface for managing and interacting with your DocStack instances, whether they’re running on the server or in the browser, giving you a clear view of your data and its structure.