Book Image

Mastering Node.js

By : Sandro Pasquali
Book Image

Mastering Node.js

By: Sandro Pasquali

Overview of this book

Node.js is a modern development stack focused on providing an easy way to build scalable network software. Backed by a growing number of large companies and a rapidly increasing developer base, Node is revolutionizing the way that software is being built today. Powered by Google's V8 engine and built out of C++ modules, this is a JavaScript environment for the enterprise.Mastering Node.js will take the reader deep into this exciting development environment. Beginning with a comprehensive breakdown of its innovative non-blocking evented design, Node's structure is explained in detail, laying out how its blazingly fast I/O performance simplifies the creation of fast servers, scalable architectures, and responsive web applications.Mastering Node.js takes you through a concise yet thorough tour of Node's innovative evented non-blocking design, showing you how to build professional applications with the help of detailed examples.Learn how to integrate your applications with Facebook and Twitter, Amazon and Google, creating social apps and programs reaching thousands of collaborators on the cloud. See how the Express and Path frameworks make the creation of professional web applications painless. Set up one, two, or an entire server cluster with just a few lines of code, ready to scale as soon as you're ready to launch. Move data seamlessly between databases and file systems, between clients, and across network protocols, using a beautifully designed, consistent, and predictable set of tools.Mastering Node.js contains all of the examples and explanations you'll need to build applications in a short amount of time and at a low cost, running on a scale and speed that would have been nearly impossible just a few years ago.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering Node.js
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Working with headers


Each HTTP request made to a Node server will likely contain useful header information, and clients normally expect to receive similar package information from a server. Node provides straightforward interfaces for reading and writing headers. We'll briefly go over those simple interfaces, clarifying some details. Finally, we'll discuss how to more advanced header usage might be implemented in Node, studying some common network responsibilities a Node server will likely need to accommodate.

A typical request header will look something like the following:

Headers are simple Key/Value pairs. Request keys are always lowercased. You may use any case format when setting response keys.

Reading headers is straightforward. Read header information by examining the request.header object, which is a 1:1 mapping of the header's Key/Value pairs. To fetch the "accept" header from the previous example, simply read request.headers.accept.

Tip

The number of incoming headers can be limited...