Discovering the importance of streams

In an event-based platform such as Node.js, the most efficient way to handle I/O is in real time, consuming the input as soon as it is available and sending the output as soon as the application produces it.

In this section, we will give you an initial introduction to Node.js streams and their strengths. Please bear in mind that this is only an overview, as a more detailed analysis on how to use and compose streams will follow later in this chapter.

Buffering versus streaming

Almost all the asynchronous APIs that we've seen so far in this book work using buffer mode. For an input operation, buffer mode causes all the data coming from a resource to be collected into a buffer until the operation is completed; it is then passed back to the caller as one single blob of data. The following diagram shows a visual example of this paradigm:

Figure 6.1: Buffering

In Figure 6.1, we can see that, at time t1, some data is received...