Node Automation
- Published on
- Authors
- Name
- Brian Kimball
Intro
In businesses there are many applications or processes that run on a schedule. There are things like MRP (Material Resource Planning) reports, EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) transactions, etc. These either run at night as to not interfere with normal business processes or need to run on a schedule throughout the day. I find myself writing a lot of these programs that interact with a database or some kind of api.
Why Node?
The main reason is packages and training (I also just enjoy the language). The Node ecosystem contains many packages that interface with APIs. Have a Shopify website or a WooCommerce website that you need to retrieve orders? There's a package for that. The other main reason is training, as there are plenty of training resources online for javascript/typescript/node programming. It's easy for people to pick up and find training. Most operating systems, the installation of Node is very simple and most applications can be run via command line.
Currently
I get sent a lot of stuff that is written in Lansa. Either the API has changed or some other reason the older application(s) are not working. Nothing against Lansa but they don't have the training or the ecosystem that Node has. Things like oauth and api definitions are manually implemented and take more time. Instead of fixing the Lansa program, it's just easier to switch to a Node application.
What does it look like?
I have been writing most of these apps using Javascript and ESM imports. JSDocs can work for types, but when creating these apps I feel it's nice to not have to worry about a compilation step. I also will use a traditional MVC architecture, even though these apps don't really have a view layer. Most of these apps are pulling api information and inserting the data into a database for use by other applications. For the database interactions, I prefer 'knex' as a query builder. I have also used the 'node-odbc' package and written raw SQL. All these apps have sensitive data so they are published to private repo. Once the application is tested and working, I will write a CL program that executes on the scheduler of the operating system.