Getting a basic Node server up and running

HTTP is a data transfer protocol built upon a request/response model. Normally, a client makes a request to a server, receives a response, makes another request, and so on. HTTP is stateless, which simply means that each request or response maintains no information on previous requests or responses. Facilitating this sort of rapid-pattern network communication is the sort of I/O that Node is designed to excel at. While Node represents a much more interesting technology stack overall, it does help engineers in creating networked protocol servers. In this section, we will move through a general overview of how to set up a basic HTTP server and then into a few more specialized uses of the protocol.

Hello world

An HTTP server responds to connection attempts and manages data as it arrives and as it is sent along. A Node server is typically created using the createServer method of the HTTP module:

var http = require('http');

var server = http...