October 2012
Intermediate to advanced
408 pages
7h 35m
English
Content preview from Professional Node.js: Building Javascript Based Scalable SoftwareBecome 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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Chapter 3
Loading Modules
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- Loading modules
- Creating modules
- Using the node_modules folder
JavaScript is one of the most frequently deployed programming languages in the world; it’s the web’s lingua franca, used by all the browsers. The core of the language was created quickly back in the Netscape days, in a rush to beat Microsoft during the heat of the browser wars. The language was released prematurely, which inevitably meant it came out with some bad features.
Despite its short development time, JavaScript also shipped with some really powerful features. The sharing of a global namespace among scripts is not one of them, though.
Once you load JavaScript code into a web page, it is injected into the global namespace, which is a common addressing space shared by all other scripts that have been loaded. This can lead to security issues, conflicts, and general bugs that are hard to trace and solve.
Thankfully, Node brings some order in this regard to server-side JavaScript and implements the CommonJS modules standard. In this standard each module has its own context, separated from the other modules. This means that modules cannot pollute a global scope — because there is none — and cannot interfere with other modules.
In this chapter, you will learn about different types of modules and how to load them into your application.
Dividing your code into a series of well-defined modules can help you keep your code under control. You will also see how you can create ...
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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.