Essential Node.js for Web Developers from Developer Week 2013

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Essential Node for Web Developers Mike Amundsen

Principal API Architect

Layer 7 Technologies

@mamund

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Mike Amundsen

Web Architect, Author, Presenter

Software Explorer

Principal API Architect, Layer 7 Technologies

Preliminaries

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Building Hypermedia APIs w/ HTML5 & Node (November 2011)

Methodology for writing/maintaining business-level APIs in the cloud.

Real solutions for real use-cases.

Three Servers, Six Clients, 200+ pages.

Last Project

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RESTful Web APIs (Summer 2013)

Co-author with Leonard Richardson

Follow up to Richardson/Ruby’s RESTful Web Services (2007)

Focus on scaling up application-level interoperability with hypermedia

Beyond HTML, XML, and JSON is …

Next Project

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Let's start with a bit of

Philosophy...

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Unix Philosophy

Write programs that do one thing and do it well.

Write programs to work together.

Write programs to handle text streams.

- Douglas McIlroy

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Node Philosophy (possible)

• Write modules that do one thing and do it well.

• Write modules to work together.

• Write modules to handle streams and events

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Eric S. Raymond's Design Rules

"Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for one true way"

-- Eric S. Raymond

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Reminder:

My Examples

are NOT

the

"One True Way"

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Essentially, Node is...

"...a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for

easily building fast, scalable network applications."

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Node is…

“Node is intended to be a very low-level library that

facilitates higher-level extensions and abstractions in

userland. It is more like C than it is like Python, and that is

by design.” – Isaac Schlueter

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And it's different because....

"Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that

makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-

intensive real-time applications that run across distributed

devices."

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So that means....

"Most of the applications we're writing today are heavily

I/O bound. Because of the event-driven nature of

JavaScript (and Node by extension), whatever you write

with it is going to be very fast." - Guillermo Rauch

(socket.io)

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But does it run on my machine?

"To build a diverse open source

community, you need a wide

platform," - Paul Querna,

Rackspace

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Essential NodeJS on a single slide (well, almost)

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Ok, introduce me then...

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Hello, Node!

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Ok, but how do I deliver files?

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Ok, but how do I deliver files using streams?

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Not bad; how about HTML Forms?

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Cool. Now how about a server-side mash-up?

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Yeah, but how do you write files?

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What about HTTP Authentication?

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Ok, but where's that "sockets" stuff?

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Alright, how about MVC & routing?

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Hey, this is all 'async' & hard, right?

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So are there lots of libraries?

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So are there lots of libraries?

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Bottom Line…

While Node *is* Javascript, the ethos is closer to C/Unix

Don’t get tied up in the “Evented IO” stuff; just write your code and enjoy

Async is the future; learn to love the future.

Get to know the NPM library; lots of good stuff there.

Check out Shelly Power’s “Learning Node” book

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So....

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Node.js...

• “Low-level” Javascript

• Non-blocking I/O

• Cross Platform

• Pages, Forms, Services, APIs, Sockets

• MVC, Templates, ...

• 1000s of available libraries

• All Open Source

Oh yeah, one more question...

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Why not join the hipster Nod-ies?

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Essential Node for Web Developers Mike Amundsen

Principal API Architect

Layer 7 Technologies

@mamund