With the ArangoDB Foxx Microservice Framework we’ve introduced an easy way to create a Web API right on top of the NoSQL database.

In early January Max challenged Andreas (AngularJS / NodeJS) that they could build a full-stack application within half a day.

The web application – in short – is a guessing game, in which the computer tries to guess a thing or animal you think of by asking a series of questions, for which you provide the answers. Here’s a demo:

http://guesser.9hoeffer.de:8000

ArangoDB provides many options for finding and modifying data. Though there are several more specialized operation, data-modification AQL queries are the most general solution in ArangoDB. They allow to find documents using arbitrary filter criteria, and to modify or remove the documents once found.

The new Javascript driver no longer imposes any promises implementation. It follows the standard callback pattern with a callback using err and res.

I wanted to give the new driver a try. A github crawler seemed like a good side-project, especially because the node-github driver follows the same conventions as the Javascript driver.

There are a lot of promise libraries out there. The most popular one – according to NPM – was promises. It should be possible to use any implementation. Therefore I used this one.

The following source code can be found on github.

Please note that parts of this article will not work out of the box with ArangoDB 3.0

Using ArangoDB as your main database is a good idea for various reasons. What I personally like about it is its query language AQL. I used relational databases in the past as my main database and writing statements in a language similar to SQL was a great way for me to get started with ArangoDB.

Having a HTTP based interface (like all the cool kids these days) we could build applications running solely on top of our database. That’s rather nice but then we would have to take care of all the gory details. So..

This is the third and final part of Lucas blog series about building hypermedia APIs. In the previous part, we identified the needed transitions and collected some information about each of them. Begin with blog post one to get familiar with concepts on Hypermedia and JSON.

We can now describe the identified transitions using FoxxGenerator. To make the most common case simple, it defaults to the type follow. Therefore defining our four follow transitions is easy using FoxxGenerator:

generator.defineTransition('books'); generator.defineTransition('users'); generator.defineTransition('item');..

This is the second blog post on building hypermedia APIs with the focus on API design. In part 1 Lucas describes the concept of links in JSON.

Imagine we have an API where people can like books and other people can then see, who likes a certain book. We want this API to be highly connected: We don’t want to look up URLs in a documentation, we want to follow links as we know it from the world wide web. All we want to do as the author of the API is give our users a single URL from which they can then follow links to all other resources. This is similar to the way we would do this with a..

When we create websites we don’t just create single pages that have no connection to other Web pages. From the beginning, hyperlinks were part of the core concept of the World Wide Web and for that reason HTML. Links are so essential to the Web that they are even used to rank the popularity of the Web pages on search engines. And who hasn’t gone on a journey through Wikipedia clicking link after link? Even though we all know and appreciate the importance of links on Websites, we rarely use links in our Web APIs.Why is that?

This is part 1 (of 4) of an introduction to the use of ArangoDB together with Symfony 2. You’ll find the links to the other parts of this tutorial at the end of this text.

In this tutorial we will implement a very simple movie database as an example of how to use ArangoDB together with Symfony 2. We assume for the tutorial that you know the basic concepts of Symfony2. No prior ArangoDB knowledge is required.

The demo shows how to create, edit, update and delete movies, how to select a list of movies from the database in two different ways. We’ll use the simple query API for most examples. The..

The data structure

Our app deals with movies: each movie has a title, a year of release and it is assigned to a genre. Each movie deals with none, one or many topics.

In a relational database we would probably create a table movie and another table topic and join them with a shared movie id.

ArangoDB follows like other document stores the “aggregate model” approach: In short..

Working with forms

The next example shows the use of ArangoDB with Symfony’s form component.

This is how our form will look like. The topics are represented as a text field and the user is required to separate them by commas. This delivers questionable user experience, but leads to an interesting question: how can we transform our topics array from our movie document to a..