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)

Factory

We begin our journey starting from what is probably the most simple and common design pattern in Node.js: factory.

A generic interface for creating objects

We already stressed the fact that, in JavaScript, the functional paradigm is often preferred to a purely object-oriented design, for its simplicity, usability, and small surface area. This is especially true when creating new object instances. In fact, invoking a factory, instead of directly creating a new object from a prototype using the new operator or Object.create(), is so much more convenient and flexible in several respects.

First and foremost, a factory allows us to separate the object creation from its implementation; essentially, a factory wraps the creation of a new instance giving us more flexibility and control in the way we do it. Inside the factory, we can create a new instance leveraging closures, using a prototype and the new operator, using Object.create(), or even returning a different instance based on a particular...