Book Image

Node.js Web Development - Fourth Edition

By : David Herron
Book Image

Node.js Web Development - Fourth Edition

By: David Herron

Overview of this book

Node.js is a server-side JavaScript platform using an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model allowing users to build fast and scalable data-intensive applications running in real time. This book gives you an excellent starting point, bringing you straight to the heart of developing web applications with Node.js. You will progress from a rudimentary knowledge of JavaScript and server-side development to being able to create, maintain, deploy and test your own Node.js application.You will understand the importance of transitioning to functions that return Promise objects, and the difference between fs, fs/promises and fs-extra. With this book you'll learn how to use the HTTP Server and Client objects, data storage with both SQL and MongoDB databases, real-time applications with Socket.IO, mobile-first theming with Bootstrap, microservice deployment with Docker, authenticating against third-party services using OAuth, and use some well known tools to beef up security of Express 4.16 applications.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Web application frameworks


The HTTPServer object is very close to the HTTP protocol. While this is powerful in the same way that driving a stick shift car gives you low-level control over the driving experience, typical web application programming is better done at a higher level. Does anybody use assembly language to write web applications? It's better to abstract away the HTTP details and concentrate on your application.

The Node.js developer community has developed quite a few application frameworks to help with different aspects of abstracting away HTTP protocol details. Of them, Express is the most popular, and Koa (http://koajs.com/) should be considered because it was developed by the same team and has fully integrated support for async functions.

The ExpressJS Wiki has a list of frameworks built on top of ExpressJS, or tools that work with it. This includes template engines, middleware modules, and more. The ExpressJS Wiki is located at https://github.com/expressjs/express/wiki.

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