the new swiss army chainsaw

Nicole Oliver, Full-stack Developer

Jude Poole, Director of Computer Services

Division of Biological Sciences, UC San Diego

 is A Runtime Environment for

server-side and networking applications

• runs JS from the command line
• has access to local file system
• uses Google V8 Javascript engine

open source & cross-platform

Characteristics

• single-threaded, asynchronous
• event-driven architecture
• non-blocking I/O API
• handles serverside scripting AND is a runtime environment
• large, active community of developers

History

developed by Ryan Dahl at

npm added

native windows version created

io.js fork created

io.js and Node.js agree to work together under Node.js Foundation

Modules

• core
• distributed
• custom - build your own!

the building blocks of your project

NPM (JS package manager)

the most modules of

any module registry,

by any measure,

for any programming language*

* just over 160,000 at the time of this presentation!

Javascript

• all web developers know at least a little javascript!
• new features in ECMAScript 2015

the world's most misunderstood programming language?

Same language: CLIENT AND SERVER

• use same libraries (e.g. underscore)
• share code (simplify validation)
• easily use JSON to pass data back & forth

Node kicks butt For...

• prototyping
• data intensive real-time (DIRTy) applications
• push technology over WebSockets
• rich client frameworks - Angular.js, Ember.js

who uses node.js?

Node.js in Action

• configuration
• simple web server
• Express web server
• Grunt- task runner

• nw.js
• WebSockets
• authentication

COnfiguration

package.json contains your basic project info

// create new package.json
npm init

// run file
node index.js

// add a dependency and save to package.json
npm install package-name --save

simple web server

'http' is one of the core modules

var http = require('http');

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
    res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
    res.end('Oh hi Lisa!\n');
}).listen(1337, '127.0.0.1');

console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/');

Express server

• Express application generator (scaffolding tool)
• Jade template engine

// install express application generator tool globally
npm install express-generator -g

// create app skeleton in a new directory called myappname
express myappname

// go into newly created directory and install dependencies
cd myappname
npm install

Grunt Task Runner

• watch for (and run tasks on) file changes
• jshint to validate files
• compile source files - CSS, templates
• minify/concatenate - js, css, html, images
• unit testing

 to manage a complex tool chain

Nw.js*

• Webkit engine (Chromium) + node.js
• From Intel Open Source Tech Center
• Linux, OS X and Windows
• Easy way to create cross platform graphical applications
• Electron (Atom.io) is a related alternative

* formerly known as node-webkit

WebSockets

• Real time two way communication
• Not node specific but node libraries like socket.io make it very easy
• We believe this technology will be critical for managing multiple people viewing and editing the same data simultaneously in web applications

Auth

• Standard tool in the Node world is the Passport library
• Generic interface with implementation “strategies”
• 300+ strategies currently available including all usual suspects (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc)
• Biological Sciences is working on several approaches w/ UCSD SSO
  • Reverse proxy via apache (like typical Tomcat) – working
  • SAML2 Passport strategy (working in test, final steps soon on production)
  • Custom strategy linked to our java/tomcat stack -- planned

our TOp 8 favorite modules

• underscore
  

• nodemon
• grunt
• forever
• mysql

• yo
• bower
• express
• passport

Nicole oliver

nicoliver@ucsd.edu

Let's keep talking!

Jude Poole

jude@ucsd.edu

Full-stack Developer

Division of Biological Sciences

Director of Computer Services

Division of Biological Sciences

References (and some other cool stuff we couldn't fit into this talk) are available:

https://unknotted.ucsd.edu/?p=207​

This presentation was created with reveal.js, an html presentation framework built on node.js!