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

Using WebSockets in Node.js


Node.js does not come with a default module for using WebSockets. While we have tried so far to avoid third-party solutions and just show you how to work with Vanilla node, this topic is complex enough to put writing a WebSocket handler from scratch well beyond the scope of the book. Therefore, for the remainder of this chapter, we will use the excellent socket.io library. We of course do not imply that this is what you should be using in your own work, and in the Chapter 6, Introducing Ionic, the Going further section at the end of the chapter, we will direct you to alternative solutions and reading materials for WebSockets.

Setting up our project

We will set up a separate project for this chapter, demonstrating how we can create a simple chat application that demonstrates the essentials of using WebSocket.

Create a separate project folder and name it chat-app. In this folder, create a blank file named app.js. Finally, open your terminal or the command prompt,...