Book Image

Node Cookbook

By : David Mark Clements
Book Image

Node Cookbook

By: David Mark Clements

Overview of this book

The principles of asynchronous event-driven programming are perfect for today's web, where efficient real-time applications and scalability are at the forefront. Server-side JavaScript has been here since the 90's but Node got it right. With a thriving community and interest from Internet giants, it could be the PHP of tomorrow. "Node Cookbook" shows you how to transfer your JavaScript skills to server side programming. With simple examples and supporting code, "Node Cookbook" talks you through various server side scenarios often saving you time, effort, and trouble by demonstrating best practices and showing you how to avoid security faux pas. Beginning with making your own web server, the practical recipes in this cookbook are designed to smoothly progress you to making full web applications, command line applications, and Node modules. Node Cookbook takes you through interfacing with various database backends such as MySQL, MongoDB and Redis, working with web sockets, and interfacing with network protocols, such as SMTP. Additionally, there are recipes on correctly performing heavy computations, security implementations, writing, your own Node modules and different ways to take your apps live.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Node Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Working with real data: fetching trending tweets


Many online entities format their response data as JSON and XML in their Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) to expose pertinent information to third-party developers who can subsequently integrate this data into their applications.

One such online entity is Twitter. In this recipe, we are going to make a command-line application that makes two requests to Twitter's REST service. The first will retrieve the most popular current topics on Twitter and the second will return the most recent tweets regarding the hottest topic on Twitter.

Getting ready

Let's create our file and name it twitter_trends.js. We may also wish to install the third-party colors module to make our output more beautiful:

npm install colors

How to do it...

We'll need the http module in order to make requests, and the colors module to get some color in our console output:

var http = require('http');
var colors = require('colors');

We're going to be making a GET request inside...