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Web Development with MongoDB and Node
Web Development with MongoDB and Node

Web Development with MongoDB and Node: Build fast web applications for handling any kind of data , Third Edition

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Profile Icon Joseph D'mello Profile Icon Satheesh Profile Icon Jason Krol
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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5 (1 Ratings)
Paperback Sep 2017 330 pages 3rd Edition
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Profile Icon Joseph D'mello Profile Icon Satheesh Profile Icon Jason Krol
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Paperback Sep 2017 330 pages 3rd Edition
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Web Development with MongoDB and Node

Welcome to JavaScript in the Full Stack

What was once only considered a language to add enhancements and widgets to a web page has since evolved into its own fully-fledged ecosystem. As of the survey of year 2017 ( https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017 ), it stands as the most popular language in terms of usage on stack overflow with around a million questions tagged on it. There are tons of frameworks and environments to make it possible to run JavaScript almost anywhere. I believe Atwood's law says it best:

"Any application that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript!"

While this quote dates back to 2007, it's never been truer than today. Not only can you use JavaScript to develop a complete single-page application such as Gmail, but you will also see how we can use it to achieve the following projects in the coming chapters of the book:

  • Completely power the backend using Node.js and Express.js
  • Persist data with a powerful document oriented database such as MongoDB
  • Write dynamic HTML pages using Handlebars.js
  • Deploy your entire project to the cloud using services such as Heroku and Amazon Web Services (AWS)

With the introduction of Node.js, JavaScript has officially gone in a direction that was never even possible before. Now, you can use JavaScript on the server and you can also use it to develop full-scale, enterprise-level applications. When you combine this with the power of MongoDB and its JSON-powered data, you can work with JavaScript in every layer of your application.

Let's quickly go through some basic concepts of Node.js and MongoDB, which will help you in following the rest of the chapters in this book.

A short introduction to Node.js

One of the most important things that people get confused about while getting introduced to Node.js is understanding what, exactly, it is. Is it a different language altogether, is it just a framework on top of it, or is it something else? Node.js is definitely not a new language, and it is not just a framework on JavaScript. It can be considered as a runtime environment for JavaScript built on top of Google's V8 engine. So, it provides us with a context where we can write JavaScript code on any platform where Node.js can be installed. Anywhere!

Now, a bit about its history! Back in 2009, Ryan Dahl gave a presentation at JSConf that changed JavaScript forever. During his presentation, he introduced Node.js to the JavaScript community. He concluded it after a roughly 45-minute talk, receiving a standing ovation from the audience in the process. He was inspired to write Node.js after he saw a simple file upload progress bar on Flickr, the image-sharing site. Realizing that the site was going about the whole process the wrong way, he decided that there had to be a better solution.

Now let's go through the features of Node.js, which make it unique from other server-side programming languages.

The advantage that the V8 engine brings in

The V8 engine was developed by Google and was open sourced in 2008. As we all know, JavaScript is an interpreted language and it will not be as efficient as a compiled language, as each line of code gets interpreted one by one while the code gets executed. The V8 engine brings in an efficient model, where the JavaScript code is first interpreted and then compiled into machine-level code.

The new V8 5.9 provides a stable release that introduces TurboFan compiler which provides performance and mass optimization benefits. It also launches Ignition interpreter which is quiet efficient for all the small and big devices like servers or IOT devices etc that varies on memory spectrum. Due to such low memory footprint it delivers fast startup of an application. We can study benchmarks in following link : https://goo.gl/B15xB2

With two powerful updates, the v8 team is also working on Orinoco, which is a garbage collector that works on mechanism of parallel and concurrent compacting.

Such a high performance with promising results was the reason to push the node 8(LTS) launch date from may 2018 to october 2018. Currently we are using node 8 with a non-LTS version. It provides clean replace for users using node v4.x.x and above with no broken library. The version 8 also has various inbuilt features like buffer improvements and inbuilt promisify methods etc. We can study them in following link : https://goo.gl/kMySCS

Node.js is single-threaded!

With the advent of the web, the traditional JavaScript was intended to add simple functionality and minimal runtime in the browser. Thus, JavaScript was kept as a single-threaded scripting language. Now, just to get a brief idea regarding single-threaded model, let's consider the following diagram:

A single-threaded model creates a single Callstack in an execution context. In the preceding code, when the function getData() is invoked, the function is pushed in the stack for execution sequentially.

In the context of Node.js, JavaScript is the base scripting language, hence, Node.js is single-threaded. You might be asking, how does a single-threaded model help? Typical PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby, or Java-based servers follow a model where each client request results in the instantiation of a new thread or even a process.

When it comes to Node.js, requests are run on the same thread with shared resources. A question that is often asked is, what will be the advantage of using such a model? To understand this, we should understand the problem that Node.js tries to resolve. It tries to do asynchronous processing on a single thread to provide more performance and scalability for applications that are supposed to handle too much web traffic. Imagine web applications that handle millions of concurrent requests; if the server makes a new thread for handling each request that comes in, it will consume a lot of resources and we will end up trying to add more and more servers to increase the scalability of the application.

The single-threaded, asynchronous processing model has its advantage in the previous context, and you can process much more concurrent requests with fewer server-side resources. However, there is a downside to this approach; Node (by default) will not utilize the number of CPU cores available on the server it is running on, without using extra modules like pm2.

The point that Node.js is single-threaded doesn't mean that it doesn't use threads internally. It is just that the developer and the execution context that the code has exposure to have no control over the threading model internally used by Node.js.
If you are new to the concept of threads and process, I would suggest you go through some preliminary articles about these topics. There are plenty of YouTube videos on the same topic as well.
The following reference could be used as a starting point:
http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~rich/class/cs170/notes/IntroThreads/

Non-blocking asynchronous execution

One of the most powerful features of Node.js is that it is both event-driven and asynchronous. So, how does an asynchronous model work? Imagine you have a block of code and at some nth line you have an operation that is time consuming. What happens to the lines that follow the nth line while this code gets executed? In normal synchronous programming models, the lines that follow the nth line will have to wait until the operation at that line completes. An asynchronous model handles this case differently.

Let us visualize this scenario with the help of the following code and diagram:

In the preceding case, the setTimeout() method is provided by JavaScript (Node.js) API. Hence, this method is recognized as synchronous and is executed in a different execution context. According to functionality to setTimeout() , it executes the callback function after a specified duration, in our case after three seconds.

Further, the current execution is never blocked for a process to complete. When Node.js API determines that the completion of an event has been fired, it will execute your callback function at that moment.

In a typical synchronous programming language, executing the preceding code will yield the following output:

If you are still interested in learning more about asynchronous models and the callback concept in JavaScript, Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) has many articles that explain these concepts in detail.

npm - the Node Package Manager

Writing applications with Node.js is really enjoyable when you realize the sheer wealth of information and tools at your disposal! Using Node.js's built-in package manager, npm, you can find literally tens of thousands of modules that can be installed and used within your application with just a few keystrokes! One of the biggest reasons for the success of Node.js is npm, which is one of the best package managers out there, with a very minute learning curve. If this is the first ever package manager that you are getting exposed to, you should consider yourself lucky!

On a regular month, npm handles more than a billion downloads, and it has around 150,000 packages currently available for you to download. You can view the library of available modules by visiting www.npmjs.com. Downloading and installing any module within your application is as simple as executing the following command:

npm install package 

Have you written a module that you want to share with the world? You can package it up using npm and upload it to the public registry at www.npmjs.org just as easily! If you are not sure how a module you installed works, the source code is right there in your project's node_modules/ folder waiting to be explored!

Package versions of modules in npm follow semantic versioning, such as major.minor.patch order.

Sharing and reusing JavaScript

While you develop web applications, you will always end up doing the validations for your UI, both at the client and server sides, as the client-side validations are required for better UI experience and server-side validations are needed for better security of the app. Think about two different languages in action: you will have the same logic implemented in both the server and client sides. With Node.js, you can think of sharing the common function between server and client, reducing the code duplication to a large extent.

Ever worked on optimizing the load time for client-side components of your Single-Page Application (SPA) loaded from template engines such as Underscore? You would end up thinking about a way we could share the rendering of templates in both server and client at the same time; some call it hybrid templating.

Node.js resolves the context of duplication of client templates better than any other server-side technologies, just because we can use the same JS templating framework and the templates both at server and client.

If you are taking this point lightly, the problem it resolves is not just the issue of reusing validations or templates on the server and client. Think about an SPA being built; you will need to implement the subsets of server-side models in the client-side MV* framework also. Now, think about the templates, models, and controller subsets being shared on both client and server. We are solving a higher scenario of code redundancy.

Not just for building web servers!

Node.js is not just to write JavaScript in the server-side. Yes, we have discussed this point earlier. Node.js sets up the environment for the JavaScript code to work anywhere it can be installed. It can be a powerful solution to create command-line tools, as well as fully featured, locally run applications that have nothing to do with the web or a browser. Grunt.js is a great example of a Node-powered command-line tool that many web developers use daily to automate tasks such as build processes, compiling CoffeeScript, launching Node.js servers, running tests, and more.

In addition to command-line tools, Node.js is increasingly popular among the hardware crowd with the Node.js bots movement. Johnny-Five and Cylon.js are two popular Node.js libraries that exist to provide a framework to work with robotics. Just search on YouTube for Node.js robots and you will see a lot of examples. Also, there is a chance that you might be using a text editor developed on Node.js. GitHub's open source editor named Atom, which is hugely popular, is an example.

Real-time web application with Socket.io

One of the important reasons behind the origin of Node.js was to support real-time web applications. Node.js has a couple of frameworks built for real-time web applications which are hugely popular: Socket.io and Sock.JS. These frameworks make it very simple to build instant, collaboration-based applications such as Google Drive and Mozilla's together.js. Before the introduction of WebSockets in the modern browsers, this was achieved via long polling, which was not a great solution for real-time experience. While WebSockets is a feature that is only supported in modern browsers, Socket.io acts as a framework, which also features seamless fallback implementations for legacy browsers.

If you need to understand more on the use of WebSockets in applications, here's a good resource on MDN that you can explore:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebSockets_API/Writing_WebSocket_client_applications.

Networking and file IO

In addition to the powerful non-blocking asynchronous nature of Node.js, it also has robust networking and filesystem tools available via its core modules. With Node.js's networking modules, you can create server and client applications that accept network connections and communicate via streams and pipes. Node contains a module named as fs or filesystem which is totally responsible for all kind of read write operations performed on files. It also takes an advantage of streaming feature of node to perform those operations.

Microservices

Dividing the app with respect to a functionality unit is called a microservice. Each microservice becomes the self contained unit of deployment. Node.js is based on the common JS modules pattern which provides modularity in structure of an application. Such a pattern is used to create the microservices. With the increase of functionality, the number of microservices increases. To manage those services, the Node.js ecosystem provides powerful libraries like pm2. Therefore, it enables the elements of an application to be updated and scaled separately.

Internet of things (IoT)

With the advent of Internet of things (IoT), the Node.JS ecosystem provides amazing library support for various devices like sensors, beacons, wearables, and so on. Node.js is considered as an ideal technology for managing the request made by those devices via its powerful backbone of streams and non-blocking I/O. Popular IoT board variants like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and so on, have more than 300 Node.js packages. The developers building data-intensive, real-time applications often find Node.js as a natural fit.

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Key benefits

  • 1. Learn the new ECMAScript along with Node 8 and MongoDB to make your application more effective.
  • 2. Get the up-to-date information required to launch your first application prototype using the latest versions of Node.js and MongoDB.
  • 3. A practical guide with clear instructions to designing and developing a complete web application from start to finish using trending frameworks such as angular4 and hapi

Description

Node.js builds fast, scalable network applications while MongoDB is the perfect fit as a high-performance, open source NoSQL database solution. The combination of these two technologies offers high performance and scalability and helps in building fast, scalable network applications. Together they provide the power for manage any form of data as well as speed of delivery. This book will help you to get these two technologies working together to build web applications quickly and easily, with effortless deployment to the cloud. You will also learn about angular 4, which consumes pure JSON APOIs from a hapi server. The book begins by setting up your development environment, running you through the steps necessary to get the main application server up-and-running. Then you will see how to use Node.js to connect to a MongoDB database and perform data manipulations. From here on, the book will take you through integration with third-party tools to interact with web apps. You will see how to use controllers and view models to generate reusable code that will reduce development time. Toward the end, the book supplies tests to properly execute your code and take your skills to the next level with the most popular frameworks for developing web applications. By the end of the book, you will have a running web application developed with MongoDB, Node.js, and some of the most powerful and popular frameworks.

Who is this book for?

The book is designed for JavaScript developers of any skill level who want to get up-and-running using Node.js and MongoDB to build full-featured web applications. A basic understanding of JavaScript and HTML is the only prerequisite for this book.

What you will learn

  • Work with Node.js building blocks
  • Write and configure a web server using Node.js powered by the Express.js framework
  • Build dynamic HTML pages using the Handlebars template engine
  • Persist application data using MongoDB and Mongoose ODM
  • Test your code using automated testing tools such as the Mocha framework
  • Automate test cases using Gulp
  • Reduce your web development time by integrating third-party tools for web interaction.
  • Deploy a development environment to the cloud using services such as Heroku, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure
  • Explore single-page application frameworks to take your web applications to the next level

Product Details

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Table of Contents

12 Chapters
Welcome to JavaScript in the Full Stack Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Getting Up and Running Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Node and MongoDB Basics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Introducing Express Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Templating with Handlebars Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Controllers and View Models Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Persisting Data with MongoDB Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating a RESTful API Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Testing Your Code Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Deploying with Cloud-Based Services Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Popular Node.js Web Frameworks Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Single Page Applications with Popular Frontend Frameworks Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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D. Wallace Mar 06, 2019
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Somewhat dated, but an excellent book. Very well written. Great starter material for a fledgling web developer.
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