Chapter 14. Node.js

Congratulations! You have now made it to the final chapter of this book. After having gone through most of the technologies used in both classical and modern web development, we are now going to discuss the basics of what I would like to call the avant-garde, excuse my French, of web development: node.js and friends.

In everything we discussed so far, we used what is often referred to as the LAMP (or MAMP or WAMP, depending on the OS on your server) stack: Linux Apache MySQL PHP. Even when we swap out MySQL for MongoDB, the acronym still stands. Or we could call it LANP with the N of NoSQL.

So we had to learn all these languages: JavaScript on the client side, to be interpreted by the browser; PHP, to be interpreted by the Apache web server; and many more. Just imagine you could swap out everything, even things you would not think of—the web server— in favor of JavaScript? That is what node.js does for you. As I, being of a somewhat older generation...