Introduction

DEITY Falcon is a platform agnostic, stand-alone but modular library to be used to easily build decoupled PWA websites.

Technologies inside

• NodeJS
• GraphQL
• React
• Apollo
• Koa
• Webpack
• Jest

Community

Join the official chat channel

Deity Community Slack

Core concepts

DEITY Falcon was built with the F.I.R.E. principal in mind:

• Flexible - Allow you to build any kind of website; e-commerce, blogs, portfolio's, you name it
• Integrable - Allow you to integrate any kind of data source with it
• Reliable - You do not have to worry about high traffic and scalability
• Extensible - Allow you to extend your project with as many custom features as necessary

Client-Server concept

The main idea that stands behind having separate applications for Client and Server parts is to provide developers/project owners/DevOps with scaling abilities:

• You can define special server requirements for a Falcon Server instance, but keeping the Falcon Client server instance more "lightweight"
• You can have multiple Falcon Client instances (geo-distributed) connected to a single Falcon Server application
• Falcon Server is stateless, so you could scale it up as you need (for example, you don't want to be stuck with a single Falcon Server instance while supporting your mobile visitors with a dedicated application that uses Falcon Server as data provider)

Extension-API concept

Falcon Server itself does not provide any data, but rather acts as a glue for your data extensions. As a result of its work - Falcon Server generates a unified GraphQL Schema that can be used by GraphQL Clients to work with the data.

Falcon Extension

Falcon Server uses Extension as an abstract layer to work with a specific entity (for example, shop-extension, blog-extension, etc) in order to provide "agnostic" data access and be a platform-independent data provider.

Falcon Extension must define abstract Queries, Mutations and types as a part of Falcon Server API, which will be "stitched" into the unified GraphQL Schema by Falcon Server. All defined methods must be proxied to the assigned Falcon API (defined in Falcon Server configuration).

Falcon API

Falcon Extension uses API as a transport layer to work with a specific back-end service (for example, magento-api, wordpress-api etc), which has to implement all Queries and Mutations methods along with resolved GraphQL Types (data structures) defined by Falcon Extension.

For example, wordpress-api is created as a transport layer for blog-extension, that means that wordpress-api class must deliver all required Queries and Mutations defined in blog-extension GraphQL Schema and match its GraphQL types (Falcon Extension does not care how this data is being fetched and pre/post-processed by Falcon API, it's important to "meet" the schema definition). All optional methods depend on the Extension configuration.

Overall DEITY Falcon data flow schema