Interview With Italo José Core committer at @herbsjs
@ItaloJosé is Microsoft MVP in the Node.js category and works at NodeSource as a Software Engineer; He organizes CityJS Brazil.
We are thrilled to be part of developing powerful tools like N|Solid. We are immensely proud of our engineers who have dedicated their time and expertise to support the open-source ecosystem. This is our way of giving voice and visibility to the projects they are passionate about.
We want to recognize Italo José's work with Herb.js on this occasion. He has been working on the Herbs.js project since 2020, where he developed the initial versions of the CLI, made significant contributions to numerous repositories, and mentored new contributors.
NS: What benefits does Herbs.js provide?
IJ: Different from other frameworks that help you to write a better infrastructure layer, like the API, database layer, documentation, and tests. The Herbs.js want to help you avoid writing it and focus on what matters, the domain’s code. How do we do it? We read your use case and provide you with the infrastructure; this way, you can save more than 50% of the time developing a server-side application.
It's good for the business and developers that will stop writing boring and repetitive code for every project.
NS: How can I use Herbs.js to improve my development process?
IJ: The first step is writing your entities and use cases using the @herbsjs/herbs library, besides you have a more organized and readable use cases’ code. After that, you can add our glues(other libraries) that will read your use case and provide you the infrastructure code like rest or GraphQL APIs, documentation, repositories layer and more.
NS: What are the most popular features of Herbs.js?
IJ: Our CLI, the herbs2rest libraries. The CLI, you know, helps you to generate and maintain a project using the [Herbs.js](https://herbsjs.org/ "Herbs.js). The herbs shelf reads your use cases and provides human documentation (this is my favorite).
The herbs2rest plugin reads your use case and provides a configured express instance containing all endpoints, an error handling layer, and auth layer for you.
These are the three most popular, but we have plugins for GraphQL, databases, tests, and more.
NS: How does Herbs.js simplify the development process?
IJ: Besidesprevents you writing 80% of the infrastructure code; we provide you with and structured way to write the use cases that allow you to maintain your code self-documented and organized in steps; it’s interesting because this way, new developers and non-developers can understand in a fast way what is happening in your code, it allows for example, project owners validate your use case rule for going to production.
Besides, we save time by avoiding writing the “repetitive” infrastructure code in all projects in our lives.
NS: How user-friendly is Herbs.js?
IJ: It’s pretty simple; as I mentioned in question 2, you write your entities and use case using the @herbsjs/herbs, and after that, just pass it for the glues, so the magic happens.
We assume you want to know more about this project. In that case, we invite you to review this amazing keynote that Italo left for the Community at CityJS Conference: Do you really code domain-oriented systems?
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