Web-framework for web-applications, also features multi-domain content management with redundancy elimination .

Currently KERN ][ or kern 2 is written in PHP (30k+ lines), this is a rewrite for node.js . As I was often asked to make the PHP version open source, this new rewrite will be free software from the beginning, if you are unhappy with GPLv3, write me an email, we can arrange a dual-license for your business case.

npm and bower are required to be installed globally. Then install the dependencies:

npm install
bower install
npm start

Very simple example to get a website up and running after installation: In the websites directory, create a folder named by a domain pointing to your server i.e. example.com . Create a file site.js in the directory websites/example.com with the following content:

module.exports = {
    setup: function( k ) {
        k.router.get("/", function( req, res ) {
            res.send("Is it really that simple?");
        });
    }
};

now run npm start and you should reach kern.js via browser getting "Is it really that simple" as plain response.

As you might be heavily dissatisfied by the format of this plain text let's add some markup. Create a folder websites/example.com/views, and add the following layout.jade file:

doctype html
html
    head
        title kern.js - tl;dr
        link(rel="stylesheet", type="text/css" href="/css/index.css")
    body
        h1 kern.js - tl;dr
        p If I would read the other sections instead I'd be able to accomplish astonishing stuff with kern.js ;)

now adopt site.js to serve jade instead of plain text:

module.exports = {
    setup: function( k ) {
        k.router.get("/", function( req, res ) {
            k.jade.render( req, res, "home" );
        });
    }
};

Still interested? Read on! :D

Each directory in the websites-folder represents a website and should offer a valid domain name. When files are required (server- or client-side), they are searched for in a hierarchical pattern. For example when www.example.com/images/lol.png is requested, it is searched for in the following order:

• www.example.com/images/lol.png
• example.com/images/lol.png
• com/images/lol.png
• default/images/lol.png

The first match is sent as response to the client. The hierarchy can be influenced by a site-config (see section "Site Config"), i.e. assume the following configuration example.com/config.json:

{
    ".*": {
        "hierarchyUp": "wodni.at",
    }
}

would yield the following search pattern:

• www.example.com/images/lol.png
• example.com/images/lol.png
• wodni.at/images/lol.png
• at/images/lol.png
• default/images/lol.png

This search order is also applied to site-modules, less-include and most other subsystems. Overall the hierarchy allows you to eliminate lots of redundancy for your websites, and makes it easy to reuse existing functionality.

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Contains the data-model description for a website. Returns an object containing CRUDs, which can be received in any site-script by calling k.getData(). Example file:

module.exports = {
    setup: function( k ) {

        var connection = k.getDb();

        var groups = k.crud.sql( connection, {
            table: "groups",
            foreignKeys: {
                user:   { crud: k.users, unPrefix: true }
            }
        } );
        var devices = k.crud.sql( connection, {
            selectListQuery: "SELECT `devices`.`id`, `devices`.`name`, `groups`.`name` AS `groupName` FROM `devices` INNER JOIN `groups` ON `groups`.`id`=`devices`.`group` ORDER BY `groupName`, `name`",
            table: "devices",
            foreignBoldName: 'groupName',
            foreignKeys: {
                group:  { crud: groups }
            }
        });

        return {
            devices:    devices,
            groups:     groups
        };
    }
}

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A website-directory can contain a config.json file. Example file:

{
    "ganymed": {
        "hierarchyUp": "example.com",
        "mysql":  {
            "user"      : "username",
            "database"  : "development",
            "password"  : "asd",
            "multipleStatements": true
        },
        "autoload": true
    },
    ".*": {
        "hierarchyUp": "example.com",
        "mysql":  {
            "host"      : "1.2.3.4",
            "user"      : "username",
            "database"  : "producation",
            "password"  : "asd",
            "multipleStatements": true }
    }
}

The root object's keys add as guards to the configuration objects. The keys are evaluated as regular expressions against the system's host name. First matching key's object is used as configuration for the website (Attention: I am not very happy with this behavior, might be changed to extend all matching objects, or even respect other configurations found in the hierarchy's search order.

• autoload boolean executes the site's setup-function on kern startup if true
• mysql object specifies the mysql-connection, see node-mysql
• hierarchyUp string used as next hierarchy-step in the search order, see Website Hierarchy
• custom object you can add other configuration values for your modules