Book Image

Node.js Design Patterns - Third Edition

By : Mario Casciaro, Luciano Mammino
5 (1)
Book Image

Node.js Design Patterns - Third Edition

5 (1)
By: Mario Casciaro, Luciano Mammino

Overview of this book

In this book, we will show you how to implement a series of best practices and design patterns to help you create efficient and robust Node.js applications with ease. We kick off by exploring the basics of Node.js, analyzing its asynchronous event driven architecture and its fundamental design patterns. We then show you how to build asynchronous control flow patterns with callbacks, promises and async/await. Next, we dive into Node.js streams, unveiling their power and showing you how to use them at their full capacity. Following streams is an analysis of different creational, structural, and behavioral design patterns that take full advantage of JavaScript and Node.js. Lastly, the book dives into more advanced concepts such as Universal JavaScript, scalability and messaging patterns to help you build enterprise-grade distributed applications. Throughout the book, you’ll see Node.js in action with the help of several real-life examples leveraging technologies such as LevelDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ, and many others. They will be used to demonstrate a pattern or technique, but they will also give you a great introduction to the Node.js ecosystem and its set of solutions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
14
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Index

Fundamentals of cross-platform development

When developing for different platforms, the most common problem we face is how can we reuse as much code as possible and, at the same time, provide specialized implementations for details that are platform-specific. We will now explore some of the principles and the patterns to use when facing this challenge, such as code branching and module swapping.

Runtime code branching

The most simple and intuitive technique for providing different implementations based on the host platform is to dynamically branch our code. This requires that we have a mechanism to recognize the host platform at runtime and then dynamically switch the implementation with an if...else statement. Some generic approaches involve checking global variables that are available only on Node.js or only on the browser.

For example, we can check the existence of the window global variable. Let's modify our say-hello.js module to use this technique...