Book Image

Mastering Node.js - Second Edition

By : Sandro Pasquali, Kevin Faaborg
Book Image

Mastering Node.js - Second Edition

By: Sandro Pasquali, Kevin Faaborg

Overview of this book

Node.js, a modern development environment that enables developers to write server- and client-side code with JavaScript, thus becoming a popular choice among developers. This book covers the features of Node that are especially helpful to developers creating highly concurrent real-time applications. It takes you on a tour of Node's innovative event non-blocking design, showing you how to build professional applications. This edition has been updated to cover the latest features of Node 9 and ES6. All code examples and demo applications have been completely rewritten using the latest techniques, introducing Promises, functional programming, async/await, and other cutting-edge patterns for writing JavaScript code. Learn how to use microservices to simplify the design and composition of distributed systems. From building serverless cloud functions to native C++ plugins, from chatbots to massively scalable SMS-driven applications, you'll be prepared for building the next generation of distributed software. By the end of this book, you'll be building better Node applications more quickly, with less code and more power, and know how to run them at scale in production environments.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

The module object

A Node module is simply a Javascript file. Reference functions (and anything else) that might be useful to outside code to exports, as follows:

// library1.js
function function1a() {
return "hello from 1a";
}
exports.function1a = function1a;

We now have a module that can be required by another file. Back in our main app, let's use it:

// app.js
const library1 = require('./library1'); // Require it
const function1a = library1.function1a; // Unpack it
let s = function1a(); // Use it
console.log(s);

Note how it was not necessary to use the .js suffix. We’ll discuss how Node resolves paths shortly.

Let's make our library a little bigger, growing it to three functions, as shown:

// library1.js
exports.function1a = () => "hello from 1a";
exports.function1b = () => "hello from 1b";
exports.function1c = () => ...