You are correct about the slow startup times. I feel it is slow as well, but there is nothing much that I can do about it. It takes about 2-3 seconds to start on my computer, but even then I consider it super slow. Anything over half a second will feel slow.

I may be able to remove connect-assets dependency since it has the most impact and not worry about automatic minification and concatenation. For production mode it is nice, for hackathons - I don't think it is crucial to have the most optimized version of your app.

Now, as far as loading modules on demand, I am against that idea because it will litter the code with a bunch of flags and switch/if statements. What you can do is remove API modules that you don't need yourself. When you are not sure which package belongs to which API there is a list here:
https://github.com/sahat/hackathon-starter#list-of-packages

We could simply access modules using require('module') when they are used. Node caches modules after first use. This would speed things up a lot.

Something like connect-assets is necessary for a hackathon starter, but it seems it has been poorly implemented inefficiently.

it's better to move to Gulp system for minification of assets,
so that gulp can start the nodejs, watch for it, and connect browsersync

@vjpr Please clarify:

We could simply access modules using require('module') when they are used. Node caches modules after first use. This would speed things up a lot.

Are you suggesting to break apart API examples into individual modules?

@rstormsf This has been discussed many times. I love gulp and use it in all my projects. Browsersync is awesome and I just started using it on my latest side-project.

However, these are additional dependencies and an extra mental overhead for the users. I want the experience to be as simple as node app.js, instead of having to globally install gulp first, then running gulpfile.js and letting it do a bunch of tasks for me. And If I am not familiar with Node.js streams, gulp tasks would look completely alien to me. If you want to use gulp.js or Grunt there are many other project skeletons similar to Hackathon Starter out there.

@sahat - awesome! Can you refer some links? Would like to see them.
Esp with ES6, iojs, gulp, - all hot stuff

@sahat Instead of requiring all the apis at the top of the file. Require
them when they are first used (i.e. when the controller actions are
called). They will be cached the first time.

On 21 March 2015 at 21:59, Roman Storm notifications@github.com wrote:

@sahat https://github.com/sahat - awesome! Can you refer some links?
Would like to see them.
Esp with ES6, iojs, gulp, - all hot stuff

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#247 (comment)
.

#317

After swappng connect-assets for node-sass-middleware and splitting declaration and initialization of node.js modules in api.js per @vjpr suggestion, the start-up time is now around 660ms - 680ms on my machine, compared to 2700ms before these changes.

I found that by using Gulp and Browser Sync, I could use nodemon to handle full app restarts and browser sync to handle browser refreshes whenever editing js/css,views. Browser sync makes the changes visible in micro seconds, compared to the 6 seconds it takes for expressjs to startup.

It would be possible to add this into the project, but not make it required to

Example gulp task..

// 'less','css','scripts',
gulp.task('browser-sync', ['redis-start', 'nodemon'], function() {

browserSync.init(null, {
    proxy: "http://localhost:3000",
     browser: "google chrome",
    port: 7000,
    open: false,
    notify: false,
});

// auto refresh browser if this stuff changes
gulp.watch("public/css/*.less").on('change', browserSync.reload);;
gulp.watch("views/**/*").on('change', browserSync.reload);
gulp.watch("public/**/*.js").on('change', browserSync.reload);

});