NodeJS is widely used for different development tasks like web development, backend API, mobile apps, and cross-platform applications. Since it is an open-source runtime environment, most developers prefer using NodeJS for performing various real-time, asynchronous, and event-driven operations.
NodeJS is mostly used for developing server-side applications, building microservices, and performing event-driven tasks. However, most of the time, it becomes tedious for developers to do repetitive tasks and keep the code organized, so most developers prefer using some kind of framework to make their work easy and enhance their productivity. This article explains NestJS, which is one of the most popular and widely used NodeJS frameworks, along with its use for builds using Amplication.
According to the NodeJS User Survey Report, NodeJS frameworks are one of the most popular and widely used by fullstack developers. Among various frameworks, NestJS is the most progressive and fastest framework for developing efficient and scalable applications.
NestJS is open source with about 50.6k stars, 5.9k forks on GitHub, and around 180k downloads. It comes with a complete development kit that helps in building applications that can be easily scaled. It has a modular architecture that allows the use of various libraries, which gives flexibility to developers to add different functionalities to their applications. Its adaptable ecosystem acts as a full-fledged backbone for all types of server-side applications.
What Is NestJS?
NestJS is a NodeJS framework for developing extensible, scalable, and loosely coupled applications that enhance the NodeJS servers. It supports different databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. Being an extremely popular framework it has incredible features like having a powerful command line interface that improves productivity, active codebase, strong typing as it uses typescript, easy integration, unit testing capabilities, and detailed documentation facilities. It is easy to use and learn. All of this is what makes NestJS the most preferred framework among developers. NestJS is a lightweight framework that offers simplified code structure and strategy problems for code organization along with modular approaches that follow software engineering approaches.
NestJS for Backend
NodeJS is mostly used for developing the backend of applications because of its non-blocking architecture and ability to do multitasking operations. About 84% of its frameworks are used for doing backend and database operations due to its reliability, flexibility, and availability of large sets of libraries and packages.
Source: 2018 Node.js User Survey Report
Using frameworks in projects saves a lot of efforts and time, and using some kind of automation tool allows developers to focus on the required feature of the application as the rest of the work is done by the tool. Thus, most developers use different tools like Airtable and Bubble for performing quick builds and prioritizing different tasks.
NestJS and Amplication
Amplication is one of the most popular open-source automation tools that is used for developing full-fledged backend applications within a few minutes. It uses the NestJS framework to create projects within a few minutes, NestJS being a progressive framework makes the server-side applications efficient, flexible, reliable, and scalable. Being fast it can handle concurrent requests as well as scale applications at the same time.
NestJS’s built-in modules feature enables the systematic separation of various concerns that have been greatly used in the architecture of Amplication. Software testing also becomes easy. The modules are based on only particular tasks, which makes testing easier and automatable.
Software security plays an important aspect of any software and, thus, developers have to focus more on securing their systems. But, Amplication uses NestJS for enhancing the security of the application, allowing users to easily integrate different authentication and authorization modules along with the guards. Let’s see how to create a simple project using Amplication.
Prerequisites
The only thing required to develop an application using Amplication is having a GitHub account.
The user has to signup into the Amplication tool using their GitHub account as shown below.
Amplication allows you to create an application within a few minutes along with offering various options to choose from regarding the databases, authentication, and authorization of the users into your application.
Developers can easily navigate through the UI of the tool, they have to create the data models as per the logic of the system and configure it by either using its interactive UI or CLI. Once the configuration is done successfully, Amplication generates a fully functional application along with working REST APIs and an admin UI based on the configuration of the data models, authentication, and role-based authorization as done by the developer.
Creating the Project
A project can be easily created with Amplication by interacting with its UI. It can be created either by setting up the local development environment or by using their cloud. Let’s see how to create a simple application by using Amplication Cloud.
A new app can be created by clicking on the “New App” button on the Amplication platform.
The new application can be created in two ways either by starting from scratch or using the sample app template given by Amplication.
We will be creating the app from the scratch. So, click on the “Start from Scratch” option. After selecting the option, within a few minutes, Amplication will create a new app with default configurations, which we can change by going to the app settings.
Amplication provides a wide range of options for customization from changing the name, description, and color of the app to setting up preferences for the authentication method for the application. Amplication automatically creates a user entity that cannot be removed or deleted as the app requires at least one user for managing the admin and permissions of the application. New entities can be created from the entities section by clicking on the entity button.
Developers can also modify the code of the application as Amplication generates human-readable code of the application that can be easily edited. The changes can be tracked by committing them to GitHub by going to the ‘Pending Changes’ control on the left side of the portal that displays the pending changes that have to be committed. The source code of the application can also be downloaded as a zip file or cloned from GitHub.
Conclusion
To sum up, NestJS is one of the most progressive and popular NodeJS frameworks that can be used for building reliable and scalable applications. Its modular architecture allows developers to choose from different libraries and various databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB. Since NestJS is heavily inspired by React, Angular, and Vue it also offers dependency injection. Thus, NestJS provides a complete development kit to developers for developing scalable and reliable applications.
Moreover, NestJS has a large active community of developers where new features, bugs, and security fixes are fixed timely. It uses a modern architecture that makes applications secure and maintainable. Thus, Amplication uses it in its backend, making it easy for you to create applications that are secure. Using tools like Amplication makes it easy for developers to focus on incorporating important features and improving their productivity.