Peasy-js: Build reusable, scalable, and easy to test business logic

Peasy-js is an intermediate-layer framework that builds business logic in a composable, reusable, extensible and easy to test, allowing easy replacement of UI, backend, and data access frameworks in applications. It promotes separation of business logic, makes it easy to test, replace, rearrange, reuse, and can be used in any application architecture, compatible with a variety of JavaScript clients, servers, data access technologies and frameworks.

The core concepts of Peasy-js include: BusinessService, Command, Rule and DataProxy. These concepts play a key role in business logic orchestration, data verification, and data storage and retrieval. With Peasy-js, developers can write code once and reuse it in multiple projects, saving time and effort. It supports multiple client frameworks and has built-in data verification and testing capabilities to ensure data integrity and code reliability.

This article was peer-reviewed by Stephan Max. Thanks to all the peer reviewers at SitePoint for getting SitePoint content to its best!

Get rid of frame dependence, not abandon frame

We should not abandon frameworks because they provide huge advantages both on the client and on the server side. The goal of Peasy-js is to abstract business logic into composable units, creating code that is completely independent of its users. Through componentized business logic, we can easily test, replace, rearrange, reuse these components and use them in any application architecture, compatible with any imaginable JavaScript client, server, data access technology and framework.

Business logic separation

Peasy-js is an intermediate-layer framework that can easily replace UI, backend, and data access frameworks in applications by creating composable, reusable, extensible and easy to test business logic. In other words, Peasy-js guides us to abstract business logic into composable units by writing code that conforms to the principle of separation of concerns (SoC).

Frame fatigue?

I know what you are thinking: "Another framework?". Yes, Peasy-js is indeed a miniature framework. However, if we set out to componentize business logic, we will probably end up writing a mini framework ourselves. Peasy-js invests a lot of time in design, development, and testing, supporting almost any imaginable workflow. Learning is low cost, and I believe you will find it very worthwhile to learn.

If you find Peasy-js is not for you, hopefully you can get some insights from some patterns in the framework on how to implement your own business layer.

Core Concepts

Peasy-js contains four main concepts:

• Easy to use and flexible business and verification rules engine
• Scalability and Reusability (Decoupling business and verification logic from usage code and framework)
• Easy to test

The following is a detailed description of these four core concepts:

• BusinessService: Represents an entity (such as a user or project) and is responsible for exposing business functions through commands. These commands encapsulate CRUD and other business-related functions.
• Command: Responsible for coordinating the execution of initialization logic, verification and business rules, as well as other logic (data proxy calls, workflow logic, etc.), and is carried out through command execution pipelines respectively.
• Rule: Rule can be created to represent verification rules (field length or required) or business rules (authorization, price validity, etc.). Rules are used by commands, chain calls can be made, configured according to the execution results of previous rules, etc. Rules can also be configured to run code based on their execution results.
• DataProxy: Responsible for data storage and retrieval, and serves as an abstract layer of data storage, covering (but not limited to) the following: relational database, document (NoSQL) database, services, cache storage, queues, File system and memory data storage for testing.

Peasy-js example

(Note: You can view a simple browser example on plnkr, which covers everything discussed in this section.)

The following is an example of how to use Peasy-js to write business logic in Angular service on the client:

(Picture A)

var dataProxy = new CustomerHttpDataProxy();
var service = new CustomerService(dataProxy);
var customer = { name:  "Frank Zappa", birthDate: new Date('12/21/1940') };
var command = service.insertCommand(customer);

command.execute(function(err, result) {
  if (result.success) {
    customer = result.value;
  } else {
    console.log(result.errors);
  }
});

The following is an example of how to use the same business logic in a server-side Express.js controller:

(Photo B)

var dataProxy = new CustomerMongoDataProxy();
var service = new CustomerService(dataProxy);
var customer = { name:  "Frank Zappa", birthDate: new Date('12/21/1940') };
var command = service.insertCommand(customer);

command.execute(function(err, result) {
  if (result.success) {
    customer = result.value;
  } else {
    console.log(result.errors);
  }
});

Note that there is no difference except for the different data proxy injected into the business service in each example.

Remember that the data proxy is our data access abstraction, which can represent the concrete implementation of file system access, database, queue, cache, memory, and HTTP communication. This abstraction allows us to exchange data proxy based on the required system architecture and configuration, while enforcing the SoC, enabling it to be reused across codebases and facilitating easier testing. What may not be immediately obvious is that this approach always obeys our payloads the same business logic regardless of the source or destination of our data. This will soon appear.

From a consumption perspective, this is all. Consumption of business logic developed using Peasy-js will introduce an identifiable topic regardless of our architecture and the technology that uses it.

Speaking of architecture, let's turn our attention to potential architectures that are easy to implement when developing business logic in this way, while exploring Peasy-js participants in a more in-depth way:

(CustomerHttpDataProxy, CustomerMongoDataProxy, CustomerService and other code examples, due to space limitations, this is omitted here. The complete code has been provided in the original text.)

Summary

Peasy-js encourages us to write business logic that is clearly separated from the frameworks used. One benefit of this is that it can easily deploy our code in many ways. Finally, it makes it very easy to migrate to or adopt new frameworks, as our current framework ages over time.

(Frequently Asked Questions part, omitted here due to space limitations. The complete FAQ has been provided in the original text.)

The above is the detailed content of Write Reusable JavaScript Business Logic with peasy-js. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!