What is Sapphire?

Sapphire is a node.js application framework, specifically designed for the creation of Single Page Applications (SPA). These applications have a number of special considerations over more traditional web applications, for example, hot loading of parts of the application when they are needed, construction of the application from multiple sources, AJAX service functions to perform backend actions and retrieve updated data, and a front end API that ties it all together.

Quick Installation Guide

Installing Sapphire

npm install -g sapphire-express
cd project
sapphire install
npm install

Creating a project

sapphire app test

Running your project

node server

Open your browser and enter the url http://localhost:8080/test/

What's going on here?

When Sapphire is installed globally, it creates a command line interface that can be used to create skeletons for a number of Sapphire specific features. The two options used here are install and app. The first creates a sapphire installation in the current directory. This will install the default sapphire server.js file, a config directory with default confiuration files and a package.json file with the required npm packages. It also creates a batch or shell script called here that can be used to setup the necessary environment variables to point Sapphire at the configuration files.

The second option, app, creates a basic application. In this case, we are creating the application "test". The application isn't very exciting, but it's a place to start.