Building Node Applications with MongoDB and Backbone

Preface

When Google released the first version of their V8 JavaScript engine in 2008, it felt like a hushed wave of excitement was rippling through the developer community. For the first time (the promise went), we would be able to program with JavaScript on both the client and the server: one language to rule them all. Web applications were already starting to become more desktop-like and ballooning in complexity, so the idea of reducing the number of language dependencies in favor of an open and transparent technology was seen as a way to allow for even more exciting and boundary-pushing applications.

Ryan Dahl was one of the developers who saw the new opportunity and wasted no time converting the non-blocking socket library he had written to the new V8 engine, resulting in the birth of Node.js. The technology he released has turned that original ripple of excitement into a major paradigm shift at a time when interest in responsive real-time applications is reaching a peak. Node.js is more than just a collection of socket functions; it provides a framework for asynchronous I/O that position it as the foundation of a whole new class of event-driven programming patterns.

The online landscape has changed rapidly in the past few years and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. The explosion of the “social” web has meant one big thing for us: more people are online now than ever before, and the demographic has forever shifted away from technical users. The Internet is for all of us, ...