What Is Node?

Chapter 1. What is Node.js?

Node isn’t always the solution, but it does solve some important problems.

Learning Node might take a little effort, but it’s going to pay off. Why? Because you’re afforded solutions to your web application problems that require only JavaScript to solve.

By Brett McLaughlin

Sections

• A warning to the Node experts out there

• Node: A few basic examples

• Node runs JavaScript, but isn’t JavaScript

• Interacting with a “Node server”

• A quick line-by-line primer

• Lost in translation

• Today’s web is a big-event web

• In the right place at the right time

Node.js. It’s the latest in a long line of “Are you cool enough to use me?” programming languages, APIs, and toolkits. In that sense, it lands squarely in the tradition of Rails, and Ajax, and Hadoop, and even to some degree iPhone programming and HTML5. Go to a big technical conference, and you’ll almost certainly find a few talks on Node.js, although most will fly far over the head of the common mortal programmer.

Dig a little deeper, and you’ll hear that Node.js (or, as it’s more briefly called by many, simply “Node”) is a server-side solution for JavaScript, and in particular, for receiving and responding to HTTP requests. If that doesn’t completely boggle your mind, by the time the conversation heats up with discussion of ports, sockets, and threads, you’ll tend to glaze over. Is this really JavaScript? In fact, why in the world would anyone want to run JavaScript outside of a browser, let alone ...