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

Node's single-threaded model


Taken in its entirety, the Node environment usefully demonstrates both the efficiency of multithreaded parallelism and an expressive syntax amenable to applications featuring high concurrency. Using Node does not constrain the developer, the developer's access to system resources, or the types of applications the developer might like to build.

Nevertheless, a surprising number of persistent criticisms of Node are based on this misunderstanding. As we'll see, the belief that Node is not multithreaded and is, therefore, slow, or not ready for prime time, simply misses the point. JavaScript is single-threaded; the Node stack is not. JavaScript represents the language used to coordinate the execution of several multithreaded C++ processes, even the bespoke C++ add-ons created by you, the developer. Node provides JavaScript, run through V8, primarily as a tool for modeling concurrency. That, additionally, one can write an entire application using just JavaScript is...