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

Defining and applying environments


Development and production code have different requirements. For instance, during development we will most likely want a detailed error output to the client, for debugging purposes. In production, we protect ourselves from opportunistic exploitation by revealing as little internal information as possible.

Express caters to these differences with app.configure which allows us to define environments with specific settings.

Getting ready

We'll need our project folder (nca) from the previous recipe.

How to do it...

Let's take a look at the preconfigured environments:

app.configure('development', function(){
app.use(express.errorHandler({ dumpExceptions: true, showStack: true }));
});
app.configure('production', function(){
app.use(express.errorHandler());
});

The generated file defines customized error-reporting levels for each environment. Let's add caching to our production server, which can be a hindrance in development.

We use express.staticCache to achieve...