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  4. Microframeworks
  5. FeathersJS vs NestJS

FeathersJS vs NestJS

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

FeathersJS
FeathersJS
Stacks162
Followers341
Votes70
GitHub Stars15.2K
Forks793
NestJS
NestJS
Stacks2.7K
Followers3.0K
Votes326
GitHub Stars73.3K
Forks8.1K

FeathersJS vs NestJS: What are the differences?

  1. Project Goals: FeathersJS is designed to be a minimalistic and flexible framework that enables developers to efficiently build scalable applications using JavaScript or TypeScript. On the other hand, NestJS focuses on providing a structured and opinionated approach to building server-side applications using TypeScript and follows the architectural patterns of Angular. While FeathersJS emphasizes flexibility, NestJS emphasizes structure and consistency in code development.

  2. Architecture: FeathersJS follows a lightweight, service-oriented architecture where each service represents a resource or a logical component of the application. It allows developers to easily create services and interact with databases using a built-in Object-Document Mapping (ODM) or Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) system. In contrast, NestJS follows a layered architectural pattern with the use of modules, controllers, and providers, following a more traditional MVC (Model-View-Controller) structure. NestJS also leverages decorators for defining routes and dependency injection for efficient modular development.

  3. Development Community: FeathersJS has a smaller but highly active development community. It is known for its simplicity and ease of integration with various libraries and databases, making it suitable for quick prototyping and small to medium-sized applications. On the other hand, NestJS has a larger community which benefits from its similarity and alignment with the Angular ecosystem. NestJS is often considered more suitable for enterprise-level applications where robustness and maintainability are crucial.

  4. Code Style: FeathersJS encourages developers to have a more flexible and personal coding style, allowing them to choose between different patterns and approaches. This enables developers to build applications rapidly while having control over the codebase. NestJS, being built on TypeScript and following Angular's principles, enforces a more opinionated coding style and structure, making it easier for large teams to collaborate and develop maintainable code. The strictness of the code style can help improve code readability and consistency across large projects.

  5. Modularity and Reusability: FeathersJS has a focus on creating modular applications by using services as isolated components. Developers can easily reuse these services in different parts of the application or even in other FeathersJS projects. NestJS, with its support for modules and dependency injection, enables developers to design highly modular and reusable applications. It encourages the separation of concerns and allows for easier code organization and sharing across projects or teams.

  6. Testing and Debugging: FeathersJS provides a built-in testing framework and offers easy-to-use debugging tools. It allows developers to write unit tests for services and integrates well with popular testing libraries and tools. NestJS, being based on Angular, inherits its testing capabilities and integrates with the Angular testing ecosystem. It provides a comprehensive testing framework, including unit testing, end-to-end testing, and integration testing. The testing capabilities in NestJS are well-documented and widely used, making it easier for developers to write reliable and robust tests.

In Summary, FeathersJS focuses on flexibility and quick application prototyping while NestJS provides a more opinionated and structured approach, suitable for enterprise-level applications, with an emphasis on modularity and testing capabilities.

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Advice on FeathersJS, NestJS

juan9222
juan9222

Jul 25, 2020

Needs advice

Hi there, I'm deciding the technology to use in my project.

I need to build software that has:

  • Login
  • Register
  • Main View (access to a user account, News, General Info, Business hours, software, and parts section).
  • Account Preferences.
  • Web Shop for Parts (Support, Download Sections, Ticket System).

The most critical functionality is a WebSocket that connects between a car that sends real-time data through serial communication, and a server performs diagnosis on the car and sends the results back to the user.

616k views616k
Comments
Louai
Louai

Full Stack Web Developer

May 15, 2020

Needs adviceonNode.jsNode.jsTypeScriptTypeScriptExpressJSExpressJS

I'm planning with a small team to create an application which is a platform for restaurants. I'm on the backend almost alone currently. I'm going to use Node.js for that, and I'm very fond of TypeScript, and I worked before mostly with ExpressJS. The team may get bigger as the application becomes bigger and more successful, so I have the Scalability concern in mind now, and I was considering these options:

  1. Use Node+Express+Typescript
  2. Use Node+NestJs (which utilizes Typescript by default)

Option 2 is enticing to me because recently I came to love NestJS and it provides more scalability for the project and uses Typescript in the best way and uses Express under the hood. Also I come from an Angular 2 background, which I think is the best frontend framework (my opinion, and I know React quite well), which makes Nest feel familiar to me because of the similarity between Nest and Angular. Option 1 on the other hand uses Express which is a minimalist framework, very popular one, but it doesn't provide the same scalability and brings decision fatigue about what to combine with it and may not utilize Typescript in the best way. Yet, on the other hand, it is flexible and it may be easier to manipulate things in different ways with it. Another very important thing is that it would be easier in my view to hire Node developers with skills in Express than NestJs. The majority of Node developers are much more familiar with JavaScript and Express.

What is your advice and why? I would love to hear especially from developers who worked on both Express and Nest

549k views549k
Comments
Slimane
Slimane

Jul 9, 2020

Needs adviceonSpring BootSpring BootNestJSNestJSNode.jsNode.js

I am currently planning to build a project from scratch. I will be using Angular as front-end framework, but for the back-end I am not sure which framework to use between Spring Boot and NestJS. I have worked with Spring Boot before, but my new project contains a lot of I/O operations, in fact it will show a daily report. I thought about the new Spring Web Reactive Framework but given the idea that Node.js is the most popular on handling non blocking I/O I am planning to start learning NestJS since it is based on Angular philosophy and TypeScript which I am familiar with. Looking forward to hear from you dear Community.

917k views917k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

FeathersJS
FeathersJS
NestJS
NestJS

Feathers is a real-time, micro-service web framework for NodeJS that gives you control over your data via RESTful resources, sockets and flexible plug-ins.

Nest is a framework for building efficient, scalable Node.js server-side applications. It uses progressive JavaScript, is built with TypeScript (preserves compatibility with pure JavaScript) and combines elements of OOP (Object Oriented Programming), FP (Functional Programming), and FRP (Functional Reactive Programming). Under the hood, Nest makes use of Express, but also, provides compatibility with a wide range of other libraries, like e.g. Fastify, allowing for easy use of the myriad third-party plugins which are available.

-
Extensible - Gives you true flexibility by allowing use of any other libraries thanks to modular architecture.; Versatile - An adaptable ecosystem that is a fully-fledged backbone for all kinds of server-side applications.; Progressive - Takes advantage of latest JavaScript features, bringing design patterns and mature solutions to node.js world.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
15.2K
GitHub Stars
73.3K
GitHub Forks
793
GitHub Forks
8.1K
Stacks
162
Stacks
2.7K
Followers
341
Followers
3.0K
Votes
70
Votes
326
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 12
    Real-time
  • 7
    Datastore Agnostic
  • 7
    Choose any ORM
  • 6
    Flexible Plugins
  • 5
    Choose Socketio or Primus
Pros
  • 54
    Powerful but super friendly to work with
  • 42
    Fast development
  • 40
    Easy to understand documentation
  • 36
    Angular style syntax for the backend
  • 32
    NodeJS ecosystem
Cons
  • 10
    User base is small. Less help on Stackoverflow
  • 10
    Difficult to debug
  • 5
    Angular-like architecture
  • 3
    Javascript
  • 3
    Updates with breaking changes
Integrations
Node.js
Node.js
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to FeathersJS, NestJS?

Node.js

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

ExpressJS

ExpressJS

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.

Symfony

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

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