Book Image

Mastering Node.js

By : Sandro Pasquali
Book Image

Mastering Node.js

By: Sandro Pasquali

Overview of this book

Node.js is a modern development stack focused on providing an easy way to build scalable network software. Backed by a growing number of large companies and a rapidly increasing developer base, Node is revolutionizing the way that software is being built today. Powered by Google's V8 engine and built out of C++ modules, this is a JavaScript environment for the enterprise.Mastering Node.js will take the reader deep into this exciting development environment. Beginning with a comprehensive breakdown of its innovative non-blocking evented design, Node's structure is explained in detail, laying out how its blazingly fast I/O performance simplifies the creation of fast servers, scalable architectures, and responsive web applications.Mastering Node.js takes you through a concise yet thorough tour of Node's innovative evented non-blocking design, showing you how to build professional applications with the help of detailed examples.Learn how to integrate your applications with Facebook and Twitter, Amazon and Google, creating social apps and programs reaching thousands of collaborators on the cloud. See how the Express and Path frameworks make the creation of professional web applications painless. Set up one, two, or an entire server cluster with just a few lines of code, ready to scale as soon as you're ready to launch. Move data seamlessly between databases and file systems, between clients, and across network protocols, using a beautifully designed, consistent, and predictable set of tools.Mastering Node.js contains all of the examples and explanations you'll need to build applications in a short amount of time and at a low cost, running on a scale and speed that would have been nearly impossible just a few years ago.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering Node.js
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


This is the first chapter where we've really begun to test Node's scalability goal. Having considered the various arguments for and against different ways of thinking about concurrency and parallelism, we arrived at an understanding of how Node has successfully maintained the advantages of threading and parallel processing while wrapping all of that complexity within a concurrency model that is both easy to reason about and robust.

Having gone deeper into how processes work, and in particular how child processes can communicate with each other, even spawn further children, we looked at two use cases. An example of how to combine native Unix command processes seamlessly with custom Node processes led us to a performant and straightforward technique for processing large files. The cluster module was then applied to the problem of how to share responsibility for handling a busy socket between multiple workers, this ability to share socket handles between processes demonstrating a powerful...