Preface
More than three years ago, I watched a couple of videos with Douglas Crockford that changed my view on JavaScript completely!
I must admit that I too used to consider JavaScript a toy language, somehow inferior to “real programming languages” like Java and C#.
This view was of course induced by the sheer amount of JavaScript crap code available to copy/paste from the web, almost always operating on an equally crappy non-standards compliant DOM implementation in some crappy browser – but after watching those videos I actually began to understand that JavaScript was a pretty cool and powerful language.
Some time after, Crockford released JavaScript: The Good Parts which I immediately read, and at that time I remember saying to one of my colleagues: “I think it would be cool to build large systems in JavaScript”.
At that time, stuff like Rhino was around, but I had never heard of anyone actually using it, and executing JavaScript on the JVM by compiling JavaScript into Java into bytecode didn’t sound sexy at all to me.
Today
Recently, however, I have somehow come across Node.js at different occasions, and I have really been meaning to check it out. If you don’t know what Node is about, I can quote the homepage: Node is “Evented I/O for V8 JavaScript.”
That’s right! Let’s break that down:
- Evented: There’s only one thread executing in a Node process, high throughput is achieved by doing asyncronous I/O, queueing callbacks to be executed upon completion.
- I/O: Not usually what JavaScript is used for, but this covers the fact that Node has APIs that treat the file system and TCP and HTTP as first class citizens.
- V8: The JavaScript is executed by the V8 JavaScript Engine that Google in Aarhus built for Chrome.
As an example, there’s the ubiquitous code sample that you’ll see everywhere – opening a HTTP server in Node:
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var http = require('http'); http.createServer(function (req, res) { res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'}); res.end('Hello World\n'); }).listen(8124, "127.0.0.1"); console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8124/'); |
As you can see, Node has a nice and thin API for working with HTTP, and as I envy Rubyists of having Rack and Sinatra, and as I am interested in how web frameworks work in general, this code sample has continued to spark my interest.
Therefore, in order to push myself through learning more about it, I have decided to see if I can write a couple of blog posts on Node.js. I will try to cover the necessary topics to develop a simple web app, and I expect to come across more or less of the following:
- Acquiring Node.js and running a “Hello world” script. Can’t do anything without having done this.
- Basic Node stuff, like how to structure code into files/modules/whatever and whatnot.
- Bringing in external, possibly native libraries.
- Building a web app, possibly with Express – a simple web framework for Node.
- Persisting some data, probably using node-mongodb – a MongoDB driver for Node.
- Unit testing my app – probably with the built-in assert API.
- Hosting my app – probably with Nginx as a router and load balancer.
Wow! – that was a lot of words and almost no code… I promise that my next posts on Node will have more code in them.
Great! Really looking forward to your node.js blog posts. Maybe we could code something node.js related on the next hacker days? Ok, thats a little internal for a blog comment 🙂
Sure! I really feel like building something, I just don’t know what to build. But you’re usually able to deliver a few ideas 🙂