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!

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