Davidherron's List: Node.JS

• Monomi is middleware for node.js/Connect that provides tools for handling mobile (and other types of) browsers.

    

  Monomi detects which type of browser the client is using to access the node.js server, by providing the 'detectBrowserType' middleware.

• Zombie.js is a lightweight framework for testing client-side JavaScript code in a simulated environment. No browser required.
• You can create a new zombie.Browser and point it at a document, either by setting the location property or calling its visit function. As a shortcut, you can just call the zombie.visit function with a URL and callback.

• Versatile & Complete Cross-Platform CommonJS JavaScript Module, Package & Program Loader
• PINF/Loader: The one loader to load them all
• PINF/Insight: Intelligence served on a platter
• The PINF JavaScript Loader combines what you would traditionally call a package installer and class loader and is intended to be used instead of tools such as npm, RequireJS and tusk.
• The loader allows for bootstrapping a consistent and state-of-the-art CommonJS environment for any supported platform (on server & in browser) and thus is ideally suited to be used as the target for the commonjs command and the development of cross-platform JavaScript applications and libraries.

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• High performance, high class web development for  Node.js

• Features

    
   
  • Robust routing
   
  • Redirection helpers
   
  • Dynamic view helpers
   
  • Application level view options
   
  • Content negotiation
   
  • Application mounting
   
  • Focus on high performance
   
  • View rendering and partials support
   
  • Environment based configuration
   
  • Session based flash notifications
   
  • Built on Connect
   
  • Executable for generating applications quickly
   
  • High test coverage

• Data.js is a data manipulation and persistence framework for Javascript. It has been extracted from Unveil.js, and is now being developed in the context of Substance, a data-driven document authoring and publishing engine. It took some inspiration from various existing libraries such as the Google Visualization API or Underscore.js. Data.js can be used in the browser and within CommonJS environments.

  Data.js provides means for manipulating data. To accomplish this, it introduces some generic data formats that you can use for representing data of your particular domain. 

  • Data.Hash —A sortable hash data-structure
    
  • Data.Graph — A data abstraction for all kinds of linked data
    
  • Data.Collection — A simplified interface for tabular data (uses a Data.Graph internally)

• Node.js makes heavy use of JavaScript’s event-based style of programming which lies at the heart of it’s capabilities for building real-time applications.
• This event-based model is a completely different way of thinking compared to the thread-based model that we’ve been so accustomed to over the past couple of years. ASP.NET Web Services or WCF services for that matter are excellent examples of the thread-based model.
• Every time a message comes in, these frameworks spawn a new thread or take one from the thread pool in order to handle this request.
• There’s nothing wrong with this approach. In fact, this thread-based model makes perfect sense for many of the scenarios out there. But generally not for real-time applications that usually require long-lived connections.
• In the thread-based model, most of the threads spend a lot of their time being blocked; waiting for I/O operations like executing queries against a database, calling another service or writing to a file on disk.
• Node.js solves this by putting the event-based model at its core, using an event loop instead of threads. All these expensive I/O operations that we just talked about are always executed asynchronously with a callback that gets executed when the initiated operation completes.

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• I’m sure many of you have heard about the new server side javascript project called node.js. I’ve been using myself to build full stack dynamic websites and find it a very nice environment to create a dynamic website. When I first started out I had no idea what sort of way one should create an MVC style framework with node or what modules would help me to achieve the model, view, controller ideal.

• I’m sure many of you have heard about the new server side javascript project called node.js. I’ve been using myself to build full stack dynamic websites and find it a very nice environment to create a dynamic website. When I first started out I had no idea what sort of way one should create an MVC style framework with node or what modules would help me to achieve the model, view, controller ideal.
• • Node.js (http://nodejs.org/) of course
   
  • NPM (http://npmjs.org/) to easily install packages for node.
   
  • Express (http://expressjs.com/) – a very nice web development framework built on connect (allows “controllers”)
   
  • Mongoose (http://mongoosejs.com/) – a solid orm for mongodb in node.js that just released a much improved version (allows “models”)
   
  • Jade (http://jade-lang.com/) – a template engine for node that allows some cool shorthand (allows “views”)
   
  • Other tools were used of course but those were the essentials.

• LAMP is the web stack that powers the majority of websites today. My argument is that we are in the beginning stages of a transition away from using Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (there other variants) towards utilizing Node.js, a Unix based operating system and MongoDB for hosting web applications.
• The combination of apache and php to serve web sites is a threaded system. When a request comes in to apache it spawns a new thread and php renders the page.

• MongoDB

   

  The NoSQL trend is gaining huge traction these days because of its extreme performance advantages. As opposed to MySQL and its other sql friends MongoDB keeps as much in memory as possible while still keeping it usable. I make this point because Redis provides the speed of memory but without the tools you would find in an sql database. Some benchmarking that proves my point: http://jayant7k.blogspot.com/2009/08/document-oriented-data-stores.html
• I see a NUM future on the web, with users running real time web applications that utilize websockets. They are sending at least a factor of ten more requests per second and the lamp stack’s days are most certainly numbered

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• the domain name nodrr.com (instead of tweet you nod … if that makes any sense … kind of a play on node.js + twitter + some physical action) for this purpose.
• • Set up EC2 Micro Instance with Ubuntu 64-bit
   
  • Set up git/github link on the EC2 instance
   
  • Download and install Node.js, npm and some of the libraries I’ll be using
   
  • Provision an AWS elastic IP and point nodrr.com at my EC2 instance
• • Grabbed a few more npm libs – connect-mongodb and connect-force-domain
   
  • Getting and error with express.bodyDecoder() … hmmm
• • Got oauth through npm
   
  • Set up the app on facebook
   
  • Jade template isn’t getting the title ….
• 12:18 – Check it Out: http://www.nodrr.com
• • It works pretty decently but needs a lot of features to be more usable
   
  • Please keep in mind that this was just a demo and proof of concept
   
  • Check out my real startup @ www.exipe.com
   
  • Time for bed.

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