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 Node's UDP module

UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is a lightweight core internet messaging protocol, enabling servers to pass around concise datagrams. UDP was designed with a minimum of protocol overhead, forgoing delivery, ordering, and duplication prevention mechanisms in favor of ensuring high performance. UDP is a good choice when perfect reliability is not required and high-speed transmission is, such as what is found in networked video games and videoconferencing applications.

This is not to say that UDP is normally unreliable. In most applications, it delivers messages with high probability. It is simply not suitable when perfect reliability is needed, such as in a banking application. It is an excellent candidate for monitoring and logging applications, and for non-critical messaging services.

Creating a UDP server with Node is straightforward:

const dgram = require...