Book Image

Learning Node.js for .NET Developers

By : Cummings
Book Image

Learning Node.js for .NET Developers

By: Cummings

Overview of this book

Node.js is an open source, cross-platform runtime environment that allows you to use JavaScript to develop server-side web applications. This short guide will help you develop applications using JavaScript and Node.js, leverage your existing programming skills from .NET or Java, and make the most of these other platforms through understanding the Node.js programming model. You will learn how to build web applications and APIs in Node, discover packages in the Node.js ecosystem, test and deploy your Node.js code, and more. Finally, you will discover how to integrate Node.js and .NET code.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
15
Index

Using Node.js modules in the browser

At the beginning of this chapter, we discussed creating universal modules that can run under Node.js or in the browser. There is another way that we can allow our code to run in both environments.

Browserify (http://browserify.org/) allows you to make use of Node.js modules in the browser. It bundles up your code together with its dependencies. It also provides browser-compatible shims to emulate Node.js built-in modules.

You can install Browserify via npm:

> npm install -g browserify

Browserify is typically used to package applications. For example, if we wanted to package our demo usage of autotoc from the previous section, we could run:

> browserify demo.js -o bundle.js

Browserify will create a single JavaScript file containing the code from demo.js, along with its dependencies and transitive dependencies. If we include this in an HTML page, we can now see it working in the browser console:

Using Node.js modules in the browser

You can also use Browserify to generate browser-compatible...