I’m really excited this was finally shared. A little backstory. This framework is the manifestation of ideas that Mike developed at Mixtent, a startup that produced three products in 2 years and eventually got acquired by Facebook.
The biggest advantage this framework has over other more traditional ones like RoR or Django is being able to model product ideas as a graph in code abstractions. This enables product engineers to rapidly prototype ideas (no need to interact with the DB), and jump into features built by other engineers (the node-edge API is standardized).
While the first product Mixtent built used more traditional django-style models, it resulted in features that became hard to manage over time. Each model had its own DB table and making changes was painful. The next two were built using a similar graph framework on top of CodeIgniter, and the benefits to prototyping speed and ease-of-understanding were visibly felt by all engineers (including myself).
The biggest advantage this framework has over other more traditional ones like RoR or Django is being able to model product ideas as a graph in code abstractions. This enables product engineers to rapidly prototype ideas (no need to interact with the DB), and jump into features built by other engineers (the node-edge API is standardized).
While the first product Mixtent built used more traditional django-style models, it resulted in features that became hard to manage over time. Each model had its own DB table and making changes was painful. The next two were built using a similar graph framework on top of CodeIgniter, and the benefits to prototyping speed and ease-of-understanding were visibly felt by all engineers (including myself).