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)

Using NAN

nan (https://github.com/nodejs/nan) is a collection of header files providing helpers and macros aimed at simplifying the creation of add-ons. According to the documentation, nan was created primarily in order to preserve compatibility of your C++ code across different Node versions:

Thanks to the crazy changes in V8 (and some in Node core), keeping native add-ons compiling happily across versions, particularly 0.10 to 0.12 to 4.0, is a minor nightmare. The goal of this project is to store all logic necessary to develop native Node.js add-ons without having to inspect NODE_MODULE_VERSION and get yourself into a macro-tangle.

In the examples that follow, we will use nan to build some native add-ons. Let's rebuild our hello world example using nan.

Hello, nan

...