Sometimes I feel like client-side developers are adopting ES6 faster than server-side developers. I certainly have projects where the client uses ES6 and the Node server code is more ES5, mainly because I don't really want to use a transpiler on the server, although I sometimes do like to use Harmony flags.

Alternatively, I could use io.js. Keith Horwood recently sent in a new module that aims to provide an API server and web framework that takes advantage of ES6 features. It's called Nodal (GitHub: keithwhor/nodal, License: MIT, npm: nodal) and currently runs on io.js.

Nodal includes support for models, controllers, templates, migrations, routing, and query composition. It has a command-line tool for creating RESTful resources, and it's designed to work with PostgreSQL.

The example code makes heavy use of new language features like const and classes. The result is very Rails/Django-like. Here's a snippet of a model class:

module.exports = (function() {  
  'use strict';

  const Nodal = require('nodal');

  class Person extends Nodal.Model {
    __preInitialize__() {}
    __postInitialize__() {}
  }

  Person.prototype.schema = Nodal.my.Schema.models.Person;

  Person.prototype.externalInterface = [
    'id',
    'name',
    'age',
    'created_at'
  ];

  return Person;
})();

It doesn't have the same kind of auto-loading magic that you see in Rails -- notice the Nodal module is loaded explicitly. It still feels like idiomatic JavaScript rather than using ES6 to pretend to be something else.

Nodal doesn't use an external ORM, it actually has its own models backed by any-db-postgres. That means Keith is developing features like model relationships. I've tried to develop my own ORM before, and the ORMs I've used before have been very mixed in terms of quality and consistency between releases, so I don't envy the work he has ahead. However, the idea of a RESTful web framework that takes advantage of ES6 for code organisation and clarity is interesting, so let's see what he does with it!