Introduction
Nymph is an ORM for Node.js and the browser, written in TypeScript. Nymph data objects, called entities, are accessed just like plain objects. Nymph includes a REST server and a Publish/Subscribe server.
Understanding Nymph Applications
Data in Nymph is stored and manipulated in objects called entities. Entities can hold most types of data available in JavaScript, including
other entities. Entities are not strictly structured, so data of any type
can be added and saved just by assigning a property on the entity and
calling $save. This makes data manipulation and rapid
prototyping in Nymph very easy. Then when you're ready to launch to
production, you would use a validation library to enforce a schema for your
entities.
Joi
is a good one. You can do this in the
$save
method on your entities before calling
return await super.$save();. This means that during
development, you don't need to worry about managing schemas at all, but you
still get the benefit of strict checks in production.
All entities are given a globally unique identifier (GUID), which is a random, cryptographically secure, 12 byte integer, encoded in a 24 character, lowercase HEX string. Since these are random and quite large, there should never be any two entities in any Nymph installation with the same GUIDs (unless that's done on purpose). Nymph also provides UIDs, which are sequential and can be used to number entities (or anything else).
Using Nymph, nearly all of an app's business logic can be written on either the client side or the server side, since you interact with data the same way in each. Anything that relies on access control can be handled on the server side where Tilmeld, Nymph's optional user/group manager, provides access control.
If an entity is referenced in another entity's property, the class name is saved along with the GUID. When this referenced entity is awoken, Nymph will retrieve it using the saved class.
When an entity containing a referenced entity is pulled from the database,
the referenced entity will exist in the data as a "sleeping reference".
Sleeping references have the right class and know their GUID, but other data
is not accessible until its pulled from the database. This happens when you
use the $wake method on it, or the $wakeAll method
on its parent.
When querying entities with Nymph, the ETYPE constant on the class determines which database table(s) Nymph will look in.
Caution: When changing an entity's class name, any entities referencing it must be resaved after setting the reference again using the new class name.
API Docs
If you want to really dive deep into Nymph, you can also browse the API docs, which covers every part of Nymph's API.
