Node.js Design Patterns
Node.js is considered by many as a game-changer—the biggest shift of the decade in web
development. It is loved not just for its technical capabilities, but also for the change of
paradigm that it introduced in web development.
First, Node.js applications are written in JavaScript, the language of the web, the only
programming language supported natively by a majority of web browsers. This aspect
only enables scenarios such as single-language application stacks and sharing of code
between the server and the client. Node.js itself is contributing to the rise and evolution
of the JavaScript language. People realize that using JavaScript on the server is not as bad
as it is in the browser, and they will soon start to love it for its pragmatism and for its
hybrid nature, half way between object-oriented and functional programming.
The second revolutionizing factor is its single-threaded, asynchronous architecture.
Besides obvious advantages from a performance and scalability point of view, this
characteristic changed the way developers approach concurrency and parallelism.
Mutexes are replaced by queues, threads by callbacks and events, and synchronization
by causality.
The last and most important aspect of Node.js lies in its ecosystem: the npm package
manager, its constantly growing database of modules, its enthusiastic and helpful
community, and most importantly, its very own culture based on simplicity, pragmatism,
and extreme modularity.
However, because of these peculiarities, Node.js development gives you a very different
feel compared to the other server-side platforms, and any developer new to this paradigm
will often feel unsure about how to tackle even the most common design and coding
problem effectively. Common questions include: "How do I organize my code?", "What's
the best way to design this?", "How can I make my application more modular?", "How do
I handle a set of asynchronous calls effectively?", "How can I make sure that my
application will not collapse while it grows?", or more simply "What's the right way of
doing this?" Fortunately, Node.js has become a mature-enough platform and most of
these questions can now be easily answered with a design pattern, a proven coding
technique, or a recommended practice. The aim of this book is to guide you through this
emerging world of patterns, techniques, and practices, showing you what the proven
solutions to the common problems are and teaching you how to use them as the starting
point to building the solution to your particular problem.
By reading this book, you will learn the following:
• The "Node way". How to use the right point of view when approaching a Node.js
design problem. You will learn, for example, how different traditional design
patterns look in Node.js, or how to design modules that do only one thing.
