January 2012
Beginner
60 pages
1h 18m
English
Content preview from Node for Front-End DevelopersBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Serving a Static Page
Realistically, we won’t want to manually write out the contents of each page we want to serve from within our JavaScript. It’s much more maintainable to store our HTML as HTML in separate files.
Since our pure HTML page will contain no logic, we can move it to
the front-end of our application and create it in our public
folder (or whatever the equivalent is in your directory structure). In
this example we’ll adhere to predictable conventions from other servers
and call our main page index.html, but feel free to name
yours whatever makes sense. Since we’re writing our own server, there’s no
defined list of filenames it will try to locate to get the default content
for the current directory, so if you use those conventions, the only
advantage is predictability. Let’s start by creating that page and moving
the same HTML we were writing in JavaScript into it:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello world</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, world!</h1>
</body>
</html>To ensure that our HTML page gets served correctly, we’ll need to
change our server code to investigate the request being made of it.
Instead of providing the same response for anything the user requests, we
should check whether the requested file’s extension is .html,
make sure the resource actually exists, and if it does, load and return
the body of the corresponding file.
To do that, we’ll need to rewrite the body of our createServer() callback:
var http = require("http"), // utilities for working ...Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.