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

Launching the web server


Let's begin with controller.opa, the entry point of our chat application where we launch the web server. We have already discussed the function Server.start in the Server module section of Chapter 3, Developing Web Applications. In our chat application, we will use a handlers group to handle users requests.

Server.start(Server.http, [
  {resources: @static_resource_directory("resources")},
  {register: [{css:["/resources/css/style.css"]}]},
  {title:"Opa Chat", page: View.page }
])

So, what exactly are the arguments that we are passing to the Server.start function?

The line {resources: @static_resource_direcotry("resources")} registers a resource handler and will serve resource files in the resources directory.

Next, the line {register: [{css:["/resources/css/style.css"]}]} registers an external CSS file—style.css. This permits us to use styles in the style.css application scope.

Finally, the line {title:"Opa Chat", page: View.page} registers a single page handler that...