Professional Node.js: Building Javascript Based Scalable Software

INTRODUCTION

IN 1995, WHEN I WAS IN MY SECOND YEAR IN COLLEGE, I was introduced to UNIX network programming. In C, you could create sockets to open TCP connections to servers and code the servers that accepted these connections. I remember the excitement I felt the first time I created a TCP server: I could accept connections and receive and send messages on them.

If I wanted my server to accept many concurrent connections, the common solution was to use threads, and soon I had created my first multi-threaded TCP server. This server accessed a shared data structure, which needed to synchronize the access to all the client threads that had been spawned. Getting the synchronization fine-grained (to maximize resources and time) and right (to avoid deadlocks) proved to be more difficult than anticipated.

A couple of years later, I entered the working world to become a consultant, programming and leading teams of programmers to implement various client projects. At first I continued to work within the UNIX world, but soon I was diverted to Java and all its enterprise flavors and finally landed on the fertile plains of web development, using scripting languages like PHP and Ruby. Doing web development, I slowly became familiar with JavaScript and the event-driven programming model, never realizing it would later connect me back to the world of UNIX.

Fast-forwarding to early 2010, a good friend of mine talked to me about Node.js. It was fast, he said, and you can program it in JavaScript. ...