Cheerio, Node and Coffee-Script

Foxx’ main purpose is to create a beautiful API for your AngularJS, EmberJS or Backbone.js front-end. However, sometimes you want to do more. We, for example, needed to parse some HTML files. ArangoDB is capable of using some Node.js modules, but unfortunately Cheerio was not one of those. One problem was that we did not support loading of JSON data modules. So, this was a good excuse to rewrite the module loader in ArangoDB to make it even more Node.js-friendly.

With those improvements, that are currently available in ArangoDB’s devel branch. You can now also “require” a JSON data file. These files must have a filename ending with “.json”. If the filename ends with “.coffee” it is treated as coffee-script file and automatically compiled into JavaScript.

A Foxx app can now contain its own “node_modules” directory to include Node modules which it requires. This makes it much easier to deploy a Foxx app.