Book Image

Node.js Design Patterns - Second Edition

By : Luciano Mammino, Purra, Mario Casciaro
Book Image

Node.js Design Patterns - Second Edition

By: Luciano Mammino, Purra, 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 basics of Node.js describing it's asynchronous single-threaded architecture and the main design patterns. It then shows you how to master the asynchronous control flow patterns,and the stream component and it culminates into a detailed list of Node.js implementations of the most common design patterns as well as some specific design patterns that are exclusive to the Node.js world.Lastly, it dives into more advanced concepts such as Universal Javascript, and scalability' and it's meant to conclude the journey by giving the reader all the necessary concepts to be able to build an enterprise grade application using Node.js.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Discovering the importance of streams


In an event-based platform such as Node.js, the most efficient way to handle I/O is in real time, consuming the input as soon as it is available and sending the output as soon as it is produced by the application.

In this section, we are going to give an initial introduction to Node.js streams and their strengths. Please bear in mind that this is only an overview, as a more detailed analysis on how to use and compose streams will follow later in the chapter.

Buffering versus streaming

Almost all the asynchronous APIs that we've seen so far in the book work using buffer mode. For an input operation, buffer mode causes all the data coming from a resource to be collected into a buffer; it is then passed to a callback as soon as the entire resource is read. The following diagram shows a visual example of this paradigm:

In the preceding figure, we can see that, at the time t1, some data is received from the resource and saved into the buffer. At the time t2...