Overview of Node.js

Node.js is an exciting new platform for developing web applications, application servers, any sort of network server or client, and general-purpose programming. It is designed for extreme scalability in networked applications through an ingenious combination of server-side JavaScript, asynchronous I/O, and asynchronous programming. While only ten years old, Node.js has quickly grown in prominence and [ [ ...]

The capabilities of Node.js

Node.js is a platform for writing JavaScript applications outside web browsers. This is not the JavaScript environment we are familiar with in web browsers! While Node.js executes the same JavaScript language that we use in browsers, it doesn’t have some of the features associated with the browser. For example, there is no HTML DOM built [ [ ...]

Why should you use Node.js?

Of the many available web-application development platforms, why should you choose Node.js? There are many stacks to choose from; what is it about Node.js that makes it rise above the others? We will learn the answer to this in the following sections. 1. Popularity Node.js is quickly becoming a popular development platform, and is being [ [ ...]

The Node.js event-driven architecture

Node.js’s blistering performance is said to be because of its asynchronous event- driven architecture and its use of the V8 JavaScript engine. This enables it to handle multiple tasks concurrently, such as juggling between requests from multiple web browsers. The original creator of Node.js, Ryan Dahl, followed these key points: A single-thread, event-driven programming model [ [ ...]

The Node.js: Embracing advances in the JavaScript language

The last couple of years have been an exciting time for JavaScript programmers. The TC-39 committee that oversees the ECMAScript standard has added many new features, some of which are syntactic sugar, but several of which have propelled us into a whole new era of JavaScript programming. By itself, the async/await feature promises us a [ [ ...]

Developing microservices or maxiservices with Node.js

New capabilities, such as cloud deployment systems and Docker, make it possible to implement a new kind of service architecture. Docker makes it possible to define server process configuration in a repeatable container that’s easy to deploy by the millions into a cloud-hosting system. It lends itself best to small, single-purpose service instances that can [ [ ...]

Setting Up Node.js: System requirements

Node.js runs on POSIX-like OSes, various UNIX derivatives (Solaris, for example), and UNIX-workalike OSes (such as Linux, macOS, and so on), as well as on Microsoft Windows. It can run on machines both large and small, including tiny ARM devices, such as Raspberry Pi—a microscale embeddable computer for DIY software/hardware projects. Node.js is now available [ [ ...]

Installing Node.js using package managers

The preferred method for installing Node.js is to use the versions available in package managers, such as apt-get, or MacPorts. Package managers make your life easier by helping to maintain the current version of the software on your computer, ensuring to update dependent packages as necessary, all by typing a simple command, such as apt-get [ [ ...]

Installing from the source on POSIX-like systems

Installing the prepackaged Node.js distributions is the preferred installation method. However, installing Node.js from a source is desirable in a few situations: It can let you optimize the compiler settings as desired. It can let you cross-compile, say, for an embedded ARM system. You might need to keep multiple Node.js builds for testing. You might [ [ ...]

Installing multiple Node.js instances with nvm

Normally, you wouldn’t install multiple versions of Node.js—doing so adds complexity to your system. But if you are hacking on Node.js itself or testing your software against different Node.js releases, you may want to have multiple Node.js installations. The method to do so is a simple variation on what we’ve already discussed. Earlier, while discussing [ [ ...]

Requirements for installing native code modules

While we won’t discuss native code module development in this book, we do need to make sure that they can be built. Some modules in the npm repository are native code and they must be compiled with a C or C++ compiler to build the corresponding .node files (the .node extension is used for binary [ [ ...]

Choosing Node.js versions to use and the version policy

We just threw around so many different Node.js version numbers in the previous section that you may have become confused about which version to use. This book is targeted at Node.js version 14.x and it’s expected that everything we’ll cover is compatible with Node.js 10.x and any subsequent release. Starting with Node.js 4.x, the Node.js [ [ ...]

Choosing editors and debuggers for Node.js

Since Node.js code is JavaScript, any JavaScript-aware editor will be useful. Unlike some other languages that are so complex that an IDE with code completion is a necessity, a simple programming editor is perfectly sufficient for Node.js development. Two editors are worth shouting out because they are written in Node.js: Atom and Microsoft Visual Studio [ [ ...]

Running and testing Node.js commands

Now that you’ve installed Node.js, we want to do two things—verify that the installation was successful and familiarize ourselves with the Node.js command-line tools and running simple scripts with Node.js. We’ll also touch again on async functions and look at a simple example HTTP server. We’ll finish off with the npm and npx command-line tools. [ [ ...]

Advancing Node.js with ECMAScript 2015, 2016, 2017, and beyond

In 2015, the ECMAScript committee released a long-awaited major update of the JavaScript language. The update brought in many new features to JavaScript, such as Promises, arrow functions, and class objects. The language update sets the stage for improvement since it should dramatically improve our ability to write clean, understandable JavaScript code. The browser makers [ [ ...]

Examining the traditional Node.js module format

We already saw CommonJS modules in action in the previous chapter. It’s now time to see what they are and how they work. In the ls.js example in Chapter 2, Setting Up Node.js, we wrote the following code to pull in the fs module, giving us access to its functions: const fs = require(‘fs’); The [ [ ...]

Exploring Node.js Modules: Examining the ES6/ES2015 module format

ES6 modules are a new module format designed for all JavaScript environments. While Node.js has always had a good module system, browser-side JavaScript has not. That meant the browser-side community had to use non-standardized solutions. The CommonJS module format was one of those non-standard solutions, which was borrowed for use in Node.js. Therefore, ES6 modules [ [ ...]

Exploring Node.js Modules: Using CommonJS and ES6 modules together

Node.js supports two module formats for JavaScript code: the CommonJS format originally developed for Node.js, and the new ES6 module format. The two are conceptually similar, but there are many practical differences. Because of this, we will face situations of using both in the same application and will need to know how to proceed. First [ [ ...]

Exploring Node.js Modules: Hiding implementation details with encapsulation in CommonJS and ES6 modules

We’ve already seen a couple of examples of how modules hide implementation details with the simple.js example and the programs we examined in Chapter 2, Setting up Node.js. Let’s take a closer look. Node.js modules provide a simple encapsulation mechanism to hide implementation details while exposing an API. To review, in CommonJS modules the exposed [ [ ...]

Exploring Node.js Modules: Using JSON modules

Node.js supports using require(‘./path/to/file-name.json’) to import a JSON file in a CommonJS module. It is equivalent to the following code: const fs = require(‘fs’); module.exports = JSON.parse( fs.readFileSync(‘/path/to/file-name.json’, ‘utf8’)); That is, the JSON file is read synchronously, and the text is parsed as JSON. The resultant object is available as the object exported from the [ [ ...]