Book Image

Node Cookbook - Third Edition

By : David Mark Clements, Mathias Buus Madsen, Peter Elger, Matteo Collina
Book Image

Node Cookbook - Third Edition

By: David Mark Clements, Mathias Buus Madsen, Peter Elger, Matteo Collina

Overview of this book

Today's web demands efficient real-time applications and scalability. Asynchronous event-driven programming is ideal for this, and this is where Node.js comes in. Server-side JavaScript has been here since the 90s, but Node got it right. With Node for tooling and server-side logic, and a browser-based client-side UI, everything is JavaScript. This leads to rapid, fluid development cycles. The full-stack, single language experience means less context-switching between languages for developers, architects and whole teams. This book shows you how to build fast, efficient, and scalable client-server solutions using the latest versions of Node. The book begins with debugging tips and tricks of the trade, and how to write your own modules. Then you'll learn the fundamentals of streams in Node.js, discover I/O control, and how to implement the different web protocols. You'll find recipes for integrating databases such as MongoDB, MySQL/MariaDB, Postgres, Redis, and LevelDB. We also cover the options for building web application with Express, Hapi and Koa. You will then learn about security essentials in Node.js and advanced optimization tools and techniques. By the end of the book you will have acquired the level of expertise to build production-ready and scalable Node.js systems. The techniques and skills you will learn in this book are based on the best practices developed by nearForm, one of the leaders in Node implementations, who supported the work of the authors on this book.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Introduction

JavaScript runs in a single threaded event-loop. Node.js is a runtime platform built for evented I/O where multiple execution flows are processed concurrently, but not in parallel. An example of this could be an HTTP server, tens of thousands of requests can be processed per second, but only one instruction is being executed at any given time.

The performance of our application is tied to how fast we can process an individual execution flow prior to performing the next I/O operation.

Through several recipes, this chapter demonstrates the Optimization Workflow, as shown in the following figure:

bdd-flowchart

We'll be referencing this workflow throughout this chapter.

This chapter is about making our JavaScript code as fast as possible in order to increase I/O handling capacity, thus decreasing costs and improving user experience.

Upcoming changes to Node.js performance...