What Is Sails
Sails makes it easy to build custom, enterprise-grade Node.js apps. It is designed to resemble the MVC architecture from frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the more modern, data-oriented style of web app development. It's especially good for building APIs, single page apps/sites, and realtime features like chat.
Sails is a Model, View, Controller architecture for Node.js, usually just called MVC. You can learn more about MVC here, but basically it's the really awesome, industry-standard way of doing things for modern web apps.
Sails does a few things other MVC frameworks like Rails and Grails can't do:
- Automatically generated JSON API for manipulating models means you don't have to write any backend code to build simple database apps
- Built-in authentication, role-based access control, and customizable policies assignable at the controller/action level
- Transport agnostic routing: Sails controllers also handle Socket.io / WebSocket messages! This makes it much easier to send the server-originated or 'comet' notifications you need for features like chat, realtime analytics, and multiplayer games.
- Automatic asset minification with Rigging: Your UI code is automatically included in development mode, and minified into a simple, gzipped file in production.
- Support for:
- CoffeeScript
- LESS