Book Image

Node.js Design Patterns - Second Edition

By : Joel Purra, Luciano Mammino, Mario Casciaro
Book Image

Node.js Design Patterns - Second Edition

By: Joel Purra, Luciano Mammino, Mario Casciaro

Overview of this book

Node.js is a massively popular software platform that lets you use JavaScript to easily create scalable server-side applications. It allows you to create efficient code, enabling a more sustainable way of writing software made of only one language across the full stack, along with extreme levels of reusability, pragmatism, simplicity, and collaboration. Node.js is revolutionizing the web and the way people and companies create their software. In this book, we will take you on a journey across various ideas and components, and the challenges you would commonly encounter while designing and developing software using the Node.js platform. You will also discover the "Node.js way" of dealing with design and coding decisions. The book kicks off by exploring the basics of Node.js describing it's asynchronous single-threaded architecture and the main design patterns. It then shows you how to master the asynchronous control flow patterns,and the stream component and it culminates into a detailed list of Node.js implementations of the most common design patterns as well as some specific design patterns that are exclusive to the Node.js world.Lastly, it dives into more advanced concepts such as Universal Javascript, and scalability' and it's meant to conclude the journey by giving the reader all the necessary concepts to be able to build an enterprise grade application using Node.js.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Node.js Design Patterns - Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Getting started with streams


In the previous section, we learned why streams are so powerful, but also that they are everywhere in Node.js, starting from its core modules. For example, we have seen that the fs module has createReadStream() for reading from a file and createWriteStream() for writing to a file, the HTTP request and response objects are essentially streams, and the zlib module allows us to compress and decompress data using a streaming interface.

Now that we know why streams are so important, let's take a step back and start to explore them in more detail.

Anatomy of streams

Every stream in Node.js is an implementation of one of the four base abstract classes available in the stream core module:

  • stream.Readable

  • stream.Writable

  • stream.Duplex

  • stream.Transform

Each stream class is also an instance of EventEmitter. Streams, in fact, can produce several types of event, such as end, when a Readable stream has finished reading, or error, when something goes wrong.

Note

Please note that...