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

Asynchronous control flow patterns with streams

Going through the examples that we have presented so far, it should be clear that streams can be useful not only to handle I/O, but also as an elegant programming pattern that can be used to process any kind of data. But the advantages do not end at its simple appearance; streams can also be leveraged to turn "asynchronous control flow" into "flow control," as we will see in this section.

Sequential execution

By default, streams will handle data in sequence. For example, the _transform() function of a Transform stream will never be invoked with the next chunk of data until the previous invocation completes by calling callback(). This is an important property of streams, crucial for processing each chunk in the right order, but it can also be exploited to turn streams into an elegant alternative to the traditional control flow patterns.

Some code is always better than too much explanation, so let's...