Book Image

Opa Application Development

By : Li Wenbo
Book Image

Opa Application Development

By: Li Wenbo

Overview of this book

Opa is a full-stack Open Source web development framework for JavaScript that lets you write secure and scalable web applications. It generates standard Node.js/MongoDB applications, natively supports HTML5 and CSS and automates many aspects of modern web application programming. It handles all aspects of web programming written in one consistent language and compiled to web standards.Opa Application Development is a practical,hands-on guide that provides you with a number of step-by-step exercises. It covers almost all aspects of developing a web application with Opa, which will help you take advantage of the real power of Opa, as well as building a secure, powerful web application rapidly.Opa Application Development dives into all concepts and components required to build a web application with Opa. The first half of this book shows you all of the basic building blocks that you will need to develop an Opa application, including the syntax of Opa, web development aspects, client and server communication and slicing, plugin, database, and so on. By the end of the book you will have yourself created a complete web application along with a game: Pacman!
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Opa Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Starting a web server


The first thing we need for a web application is a web server. In this section we will see how to start a web server using Opa.

A simple example

As a web application, resources such as web pages, images, and audios need to be served to users; therefore, we need an HTTP server. Let's think for a moment about how we would do that in PHP. The typical setup would be an Apache HTTP server with mod_php5 installed.

With Opa, things are a bit different. We not only implement our application, but also the whole HTTP server. In fact, our web application and its web server are basically the same. Our code will be translated into Node.js script after compilation, and will be run with Node.js. The benefit of integrating the server with a web application is increased security. Let's just start with a simple example:

Server.start(Server.http, {text: "hello Opa"})

Save this code into a file, 301.opa for example, then compile and run it. The two concluding dashes are needed to launch the...