Book Image

Node.js Web Development - Fifth Edition

By : David Herron
Book Image

Node.js Web Development - Fifth Edition

By: David Herron

Overview of this book

Node.js is the leading choice of server-side web development platform, enabling developers to use the same tools and paradigms for both server-side and client-side software. This updated fifth edition of Node.js Web Development focuses on the new features of Node.js 14, Express 4.x, and ECMAScript, taking you through modern concepts, techniques, and best practices for using Node.js. The book starts by helping you get to grips with the concepts of building server-side web apps with Node.js. You’ll learn how to develop a complete Node.js web app, with a backend database tier to help you explore several databases. You'll deploy the app to real web servers, including a cloud hosting platform built on AWS EC2 using Terraform and Docker Swarm, while integrating other tools such as Redis and NGINX. As you advance, you'll learn about unit and functional testing, along with deploying test infrastructure using Docker. Finally, you'll discover how to harden Node.js app security, use Let's Encrypt to provision the HTTPS service, and implement several forms of app security with the help of expert practices. With each chapter, the book will help you put your knowledge into practice throughout the entire life cycle of developing a web app. By the end of this Node.js book, you’ll have gained practical Node.js web development knowledge and be able to build and deploy your own apps on a public web hosting solution.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Node.js
6
Section 2: Developing the Express Application
12
Section 3: Deployment
Dynamic Client/Server Interaction with Socket.IO

The original design model of the web is similar to the way that mainframes worked in the 1970s. Both old-school dumb terminals, such as the IBM 3270, and web browsers follow a request-response paradigm. The user sends a request and the far-off computer sends a response. That request-response paradigm is evident in the Node.js HTTP Server API, as shown in the following code:

http.createServer(function (request, response) {
... handle request
}).listen();

The paradigm couldn't be more explicit than this. The request and the response are right there.

It wasn't until JavaScript improved that we had a quite different paradigm. The new paradigm is interactive communication driven by browser-side JavaScript. This change in the web application model is called, by some, the real-time web. In some cases, websites keep an open...