Book Image

Node.js Design Patterns

By : Mario Casciaro
Book Image

Node.js Design Patterns

By: Mario Casciaro

Overview of this book

Node.js is a massively popular software platform that lets you use JavaScript to easily create scalable server-side applications. It allows you to create efficient code, enabling a more sustainable way of writing software made of only one language across the full stack, along with extreme levels of reusability, pragmatism, simplicity, and collaboration. Node.js is revolutionizing the web and the way people and companies create their software. In this book, we will take you on a journey across various ideas and components, and the challenges you would commonly encounter while designing and developing software using the Node.js platform. You will also discover the "Node.js way" of dealing with design and coding decisions. The book kicks off by exploring the fundamental principles and components that define the platform. It then shows you how to master asynchronous programming and how to design elegant and reusable components using well-known patterns and techniques. The book rounds off by teaching you the various approaches to scale, distribute, and integrate your Node.js application.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Node.js Design Patterns
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Middleware


One of the most distinctive patterns in Node.js is definitely middleware. Unfortunately it's also one of the most confusing for the inexperienced, especially for developers coming from the enterprise programming world. The reason for the disorientation is probably connected with the meaning of the term middleware, which in the enterprise architecture's jargon represents the various software suites that help to abstract lower level mechanisms such as OS APIs, network communications, memory management, and so on, allowing the developer to focus only on the business case of the application. In this context, the term middleware recalls topics such as CORBA, Enterprise Service Bus, Spring, JBoss, but in its more generic meaning it can also define any kind of software layer that acts like a glue between lower level services and the application (literally the software in the middle).

Middleware in Express

Express (http://expressjs.com) popularized the term middleware in the Node.js world...