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.

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Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
Understanding the Node Environment
Understanding the Node Environment
Introduction – JavaScript as a systems language
Standard libraries
Extending JavaScript
V8, JavaScript, and optimizations
The process object
The REPL
Summary
2
Understanding Asynchronous Event-Driven Programming
Understanding Asynchronous Event-Driven Programming
Node's unique design
Understanding the event loop
Listening for events
Timers
Concurrency and errors
Building a Twitter feed using file events
Summary
3
Streaming Data Across Nodes and Clients
Streaming Data Across Nodes and Clients
Why use streams?
Exploring streams
Creating an HTTP server
HTTPS, TLS (SSL), and securing your server
The request object
Working with headers
Handling POST data
Creating and streaming images with Node
Summary
4
Using Node to Access the Filesystem
Using Node to Access the Filesystem
Directories, and iterating over files and folders
Reading from a file
Writing to a file
Serving static files
Handling file uploads
A simple file browser
Summary
5
Managing Many Simultaneous Client Connections
Managing Many Simultaneous Client Connections
Understanding concurrency
Routing requests
Using Redis for tracking client state
Handling sessions
Authenticating connections
Summary
Further reading
6
Creating Real-Time Applications
Creating Real-Time Applications
Introducing AJAX
Bidirectional communication with socket.io
Listening for Server Sent Events
Building a collaborative document editing application
Summary
7
Using Multiple Processes
Using Multiple Processes
Node's single-threaded model
Creating child processes
Communicating with your child
Parsing a file using multiple processes
Using PM2 to manage multiple processes
Real-time activity updates of multiple worker results
Summary
8
Scaling Your Application
Scaling Your Application
When to scale?
Running multiple Node servers
Message queues – RabbitMQ
Using Node's UDP module
Using Amazon Web Services in your application
Using Twilio to create an SMS bot on Heroku
Summary
9
Microservices
Microservices
Why microservices?
From 3-Tiers to 4-Tiers
Deploying microservices
Serverless applications
Containerized microservices
Summary
10
Testing Your Application
Testing Your Application
Why testing is important
Native Node testing and debugging tools
Testing with Mocha, Chai, and Sinon
Headless testing with Nightmare and Puppeteer
Testing the terrain
Testing processes, memory, and CPU
Summary
11
Organizing Your Work into Modules
Organizing Your Work into Modules
How to load and use modules
The module object
How Node handles module paths
Creating a package file
12
Creating Your Own C++ Add-ons
Creating Your Own C++ Add-ons
Hello World
A calculator
Using NAN
Closing thoughts
Links and resources

Node's single-threaded model

Taken in its entirety, the Node environment usefully demonstrates both the efficiency of multithreaded parallelism and an expressive syntax amenable to applications featuring high concurrency. Using Node does not constrain the developer, the developer's access to system resources, or the types of applications the developer might like to build.

Nevertheless, a surprising number of persistent criticisms of Node are based on this misunderstanding. As we'll see, the belief that Node is not multithreaded and is, therefore, slow, or not ready for prime time, simply misses the point. JavaScript is single-threaded; the Node stack is not. JavaScript represents the language used to coordinate the execution of several multithreaded C++ processes, even the bespoke C++ add-ons created by you, the developer. Node provides JavaScript, run through V8...

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