What is Alinex?

Just now it is a modular, flexible and powerful tool set for applications mostly in the backend but also in frontend. It aims to help the developer to create individual solutions in a fast and easy but stable way.

It is used in production for IT operations and maintenance.

1. Why I created it?

As I got more into the concept of NodeJS I found out that this is the ideal solution for the Alinex platform. I use this project to check new technologies out and hopefully bring it more on the way than my PHP server part just now.

I worked further on creating a modular system with some of the great modules available. Hardest thing is to find the best module for each job out of the great repository. With this project I went to new land (for me) in the web technologies and tried lots of the current propagated technologies and patterns out.

2. Language Decision

As always the world is neither black nor white but something between and everybody sees it his way. You may decide other than I and the NodeJS language is neither always the best but I love the rapid prototyping and package management of it.

I am using ES6 or CoffeeScript here but all modules will be transformed into pure JavaScript before releasing them. So you have no need to use the newest V8 or CoffeeScript if you include one of the Alinex modules.

If the performance would be higher rated as the fast prototyping I would have decided to use Rust. I checked the language out and found it appealing as core language. But mostly it is outweighed by the features of NodeJS modules and its fast prototyping.

3. Relations

The Alinex modules often have a strong relation to the config and validator modules but don't be alarmed you don't have to use only the Alinex modules and they are usable also outside the Alinex namespace.

4. Open Source

Why do I things like Alinex as open source? Open source software isn't about doing free work. It's about giving back to the community.

I live in a world of open source, most code on my notebook, workstation and servers are free and open source and they work. Linux isn't written by only unpaid people who just have a hobby. Linux is written mostly by companies like Novell, Red Hat, IBM, and even Oracle.

Other people are helping me write my code in exchange for me sharing my code and knowledge. It's a win-win situation.

5. History

After my study in the mid of 1998 I used a lot of Perl to do my webmaster job and we created different small to medium sized tools and also a full featured CMS with it to do this work. After that I worked some years as developer and architect in a university attached company making a web application based on Java technology.

While I was working with Java I started making modules in php in my leisure time to check out what is possible. This was the start of a long running project which has not really a clear goal but to learn and make good basic modules. Over some years I got on with it but sometimes did some side peaks into other languages like Python or Ruby.

As I got a peek at NodeJS (it was in version 0.10 at this time) I got a deeper look and started my first tests with it. I found it appealing and together with CoffeeScript (looks like python code ;-) I switched to more go with this language for the future. A lot of my ideas from the php modules were converted and I build just a good module base to also use it in different projects at work. In this time I has changed again and was more working in Administration and Development of IT operations helper systems.

The whole time I try to be up to date and checkout new technologies and tools as far as they look suited for me. I'm not only into scripting and also got deeper looks into Go and Rust but I'm clearly a Linux guy.

Now at the time of starting to write this book I go further on with JavaScript and try to catch time by using the newest technologies again.

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