Book Image

Professional JavaScript

By : Hugo Di Francesco, Siyuan Gao, Vinicius Isola, Philip Kirkbride
Book Image

Professional JavaScript

By: Hugo Di Francesco, Siyuan Gao, Vinicius Isola, Philip Kirkbride

Overview of this book

In depth knowledge of JavaScript makes it easier to learn a variety of other frameworks, including React, Angular, and related tools and libraries. This book is designed to help you cover the core JavaScript concepts you need to build modern applications. You'll start by learning how to represent an HTML document in the Document Object Model (DOM). Then, you'll combine your knowledge of the DOM and Node.js to create a web scraper for practical situations. As you read through further lessons, you'll create a Node.js-based RESTful API using the Express library for Node.js. You'll also understand how modular designs can be used for better reusability and collaboration with multiple developers on a single project. Later lessons will guide you through building unit tests, which ensure that the core functionality of your program is not affected over time. The book will also demonstrate how constructors, async/await, and events can load your applications quickly and efficiently. Finally, you'll gain useful insights into functional programming concepts such as immutability, pure functions, and higher-order functions. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to tackle any real-world JavaScript development problem using a modern JavaScript approach, both for the client and server sides.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

HTTP APIs

In the beginning, Node.js was created with the objective of replacing old web servers that used the traditional model of one thread per connection. In the thread-per-request model, the server keeps a port open, and when a new connection comes in, it uses a thread from the pool or creates a new one to execute the work the user asked for. All of the operations on the server side happen synchronously, which means that while a file is being read from disk or a record from the database, the thread sleeps. The following illustration depicts this model:

Figure 3.6: On the thread-per-request model, threads sleep while the I/O and other blocking operations happen

The problem with the thread-per-request model is that threads are expensive to create, and having them sleep while there's more work to do means a waste of resources. Another issue is that when the number of threads is higher than the number of CPUs, they start losing their most precious value...