Book Image

Learning Node.js for Mobile Application Development

By : Stefan Buttigieg
Book Image

Learning Node.js for Mobile Application Development

By: Stefan Buttigieg

Overview of this book

Node.js is a massively popular JavaScript library that lets you use JavaScript to easily program scalable network applications and web services. People approaching Node.js for the first time are often attracted by its efficiency, scalability, and the fact that it's based on JavaScript, the language of the Web, which means that developers can use the same language to write backend code. Also, it’s increasingly being seen as a modern replacement for PHP in web development, which relies on fast-paced data exchange. The growing community and the large amount of available modules makes Node.js one of the most attractive development environments. This book takes a step-wise and incremental approach toward developing cross-platform mobile technologies using existing web technologies. This will allow you to truly understand and become proficient in developing cross-platform mobile applications with Node.js, Ionic Framework, and MongoDB. The book starts off by introducing all the necessary requirements and knowledge to build a mobile application with a companion web service. It covers the ability to create an API from scratch and implement a comprehensive user database that will give you the opportunity to offer a mobile application with a personalized experience. Midway through the book, you will learn the basic processes to create a successful mobile application. You will also gain higher-level knowledge, allowing you to develop a functional and secure mobile application to ensure a seamless user experience for end users. Finally, the book ends with more advanced projects, which will bring together all the knowledge and expertise developed in the previous chapters to create a practical and functional mobile-application that has useful real-world features.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
14
14. Creating an E-Commerce Application Using the Ionic Framework
15
Index

RESTing easy

One of the greatest challenges of the Internet age has always been to make networked services talk to each other in a uniform and efficient manner. It is the reason behind why we have developed a plethora of communications protocols that we depend on today, such as the all-important TCP/IP stack. Protocols like these make formal communication between applications a straightforward process, at least as far as the actual bytes on the wire are concerned.

However, there is no single de facto specification for how applications should communicate data abstractions to each other. Raw TCP/IP only understands the exchange of data packets; it knows nothing about abstractions such as customers, orders or products. To raise the abstraction level and build an interface that allows intuitive communication with our backend, we will have to rely on a custom implementation of one or more architectural patterns in order to get what we want. Today, there are several such patterns in wide usage...