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

Creating a WebSocket server


For this task, we will use the non-core websocket module to create a pure WebSocket server that will receive and respond to WebSocket requests from the browser.

Getting ready

We'll create a new folder for our project which will hold two files: server.js and client.html. server.js. They provide the server-side websocket functionality and serve up the client.html file. For the server-side WebSocket functionality, we also need to install the websocket module:

npm install websocket

Note

For more information on the websocket module, see https://www.github.com/Worlize/WebSocket-Node.

How to do it...

A WebSocket is an HTTP upgrade. As such, WebSocket servers run on top of HTTP servers. So we'll require the http and websocket servers, plus we'll also load our client.html file (which we'll be creating soon) and the url module:

var http = require('http');
var WSServer = require('websocket').server;
var url = require('url');
var clientHtml = require('fs').readFileSync('client...