Book Image

Learn WebAssembly

By : Mike Rourke
Book Image

Learn WebAssembly

By: Mike Rourke

Overview of this book

WebAssembly is a brand-new technology that represents a paradigm shift in web development. This book teaches programmers to leverage this technology to write high-performance applications that run in the browser. This book introduces you to powerful WebAssembly concepts to help you write lean and powerful web applications with native performance. You start with the evolution of web programming, the state of things today, and what can be done with the advent and release of WebAssembly. We take a look at the journey from JavaScript to asm.js to WebAssembly. We then move on to analyze the anatomy of a WebAssembly module and the relationship between binary and text formats, along with the corresponding JavaScript API. Further on, you'll implement all the techniques you've learned to build a high-performance application using C and WebAssembly, and then port an existing game written in C++ to WebAssembly using Emscripten. By the end of this book, you will be well-equipped to create high-performance applications and games for the web using WebAssembly.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Server-side WebAssembly with Express


Node.js can be used in several ways to add value to a WebAssembly project. In this section, we're going to walk through an example Node.js application that integrates WebAssembly. The application uses Express with some simple routes to call functions from a compiled Wasm module.

Overview of the project

The project reuses some of the code from the application we built in Chapter 7Creating an Application from Scratch (Cook the Books) to demonstrate how Node.js can be used with WebAssembly. The code for this section is located in the /chapter-09-node/server-example folder in the learn-webassembly repository. We're going to review portions of the application directly applicable to Node.js. The following structure represents the file structure for the project:

├── /lib
│    └── main.c
├── /src
|    ├── Transaction.js
|    ├── /assets
|    │   ├── db.json
|    │   ├── main.wasm
|    │   └── memory.wasm
|    ├── assign-routes.js
|    ├── index.js
|    └── load...