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

Callbacks over socket.io transport


With socket.io we can execute a callback function over WebSockets (or a relevant fallback). The function is defined client side, yet called server side (and vice versa). This can be a very powerful way to share processing resources and functionality between clients and servers.

In this recipe, we'll create a way for the server to call a client-side function that squares a number, and for the client to call a server-side function that sends Base64 encoding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64) of a sentence back to the client.

Getting ready

We simply need to create a new folder with new client.html and server.js files.

How to do it...

On our server, as before, we load our http module and the client.html file, create our HTTP server, attach socket.io, and set the origins policy.

var http = require('http');
var clientHtml = require('fs').readFileSync('client.html');
var plainHttpServer = http.createServer(function (request, response) {
response.writeHead(200, ...