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

Storing and retrieving data with MongoDB


MongoDB is a NoSQL database offering that maintains a philosophy of performance over features. It's designed for speed and scalability. Instead of working relationally, it implements a document-based model that has no need for schemas (column definitions). The document model works well for scenarios where relationships between data are flexible and where minimal potential data loss is an acceptable cost for the speed enhancements (a blog for instance).

While it's in the NoSQL family, MongoDB attempts to sit between two worlds, providing a syntax reminiscent of SQL but operating non-relationally.

In this task, we'll implement the same quotes database as in the previous recipe, using MongoDB instead of MySQL.

Getting ready

We'll want to run a MongoDB server locally. It can be downloaded from http://www.mongodb.org/downloads.

Let's start the MongoDB service, mongod, in the default debug mode:

mongod --dbpath [a folder for the database]

This allows us to...