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
Other Books You May Enjoy
15
Index

Callback best practices and control flow patterns

Now that you have met your first example of callback hell, you know what you should definitely avoid; however, that's not the only concern when writing asynchronous code. In fact, there are several situations where controlling the flow of a set of asynchronous tasks requires the use of specific patterns and techniques, especially if we are only using plain JavaScript without the aid of any external library. For example, iterating over a collection by applying an asynchronous operation in sequence is not as easy as invoking forEach() over an array; it actually requires a technique similar to recursion.

In this section, you will learn not only about how to avoid callback hell, but also how to implement some of the most common control flow patterns, using only simple and plain JavaScript.

Callback discipline

When writing asynchronous code, the first rule to keep in mind is to not abuse in-place function...