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Digging Into Node (Frontend Masters, Kyle Simpson, 5/9/2019)

My notes from attending the filming of the Frontend Masters course Digging Into Node by Kyle Simpson.

The main takeaways for me were:

  • becoming familiar with how stream processing works in Node code
  • becoming familiar with core packages to use
  • learning how to make a simple webserver without using Express
  • learning how to spawn processes in Node to create parallelism for load tests against a server

I'm not sure when, if ever, I'll use this. If I ever have to do serious Node work, I may reference the video or these notes.

Random Notes

  • JS is well-suited to high throughput / low latency tasks
  • Kyle was attempting to write a server-side JavaScript engine with V8 before he heard of Node. He was excited when Node was released.
  • The author of Node originally was writing a system in Ruby, but found he needed something like the JS event loop, so he switched to JS to get that for free.
  • Node is well-suited to usage as a "middle end" system to bridge between frontend/backend
  • Add #!/usr/bin/env node to top of your Node script file and make executable so you can run it from cmd line without referencing node
  • GZip compression was designed as a streaming algorithm
  • Streams have events you can listen to, like "end" to know when a stream is done
  • Wow console.table() is pretty cool for printing arrays of flat objects (e.g. any DB data)
  • Debugging in Chrome:
    • Use GoogleChromeLabs/ndb or ...
    • Open Chrome and navigate to this URL: chrome://inspect/#devices
    • Launch a node script with node --inspect <name of script file>
    • Return to chrome and see a new row referencing the running script and an inspect link ... click it
    • Go to the Sources tab and click Pause on exceptions and check the checkbox
    • When you hit an exception, debug!
  • Production tips:

Packages Used

There are sooo many packages available in the Node ecosystem. It's good to see what someone like Kyle uses..

Included with Node

  • path: deal with file paths
  • fs: deal with files
  • stream: ability to process input and output in chunksspecifically the Transform function,
  • zlib: streaming impl of gZip/Unzip compression
  • util: .promisify takes something that requires callbacks and returns one that returns promises
  • http: to create an HTTP server
  • child_process: spawning a process

3rd Party

  • minimist: simple handling of command line params. yargs if you need more
  • caf: cancelable async flows, allows you to provi
  • sqlite3: a decent database
  • node-static-alias: serve static files
  • node-fetch: just like fetch in the browser
  • express: ubiquitous library for web-server apps