Node.js Design Patterns

Design and implement production-grade Node.js applications using proven patterns and techniques, 3rd Edition

Mario Casciaro, Luciano Mammino

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781839210440
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Programmierung in JavaScript

Learn proven patterns, techniques, and tricks to take full advantage of the Node.js platform. Master well-known design principles to create applications that are readable, extensible, and that can grow big.Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free eBook in the PDF format.

Key Features

• Learn how to create solid server-side applications by leveraging the full power of Node.js
• Understand how Node.js works and learn how to take full advantage of its core components as well as the solutions offered by its ecosystem
• Avoid common mistakes and use proven patterns to create production grade Node.js applications

Book Description

In this book, we will show you how to implement a series of best practices and design patterns to help you create efficient and robust Node.js applications with ease.We kick off by exploring the basics of Node.js, analyzing its asynchronous event driven architecture and its fundamental design patterns. We then show you how to build asynchronous control flow patterns with callbacks, promises and async/await. Next, we dive into Node.js streams, unveiling their power and showing you how to use them at their full capacity. Following streams is an analysis of different creational, structural, and behavioral design patterns that take full advantage of JavaScript and Node.js. Lastly, the book dives into more advanced concepts such as Universal JavaScript, scalability and messaging patterns to help you build enterprise-grade distributed applications.Throughout the book, you'll see Node.js in action with the help of several real-life examples leveraging technologies such as LevelDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ, and many others. They will be used to demonstrate a pattern or technique, but they will also give you a great introduction to the Node.js ecosystem and its set of solutions.

What you will learn

• Become comfortable with writing asynchronous code by leveraging callbacks, promises, and the async/await syntax
• Leverage Node.js streams to create data-driven asynchronous processing pipelines
• Implement well-known software design patterns to create production grade applications
• Share code between Node.js and the browser and take advantage of full-stack JavaScript
• Build and scale microservices and distributed systems powered by Node.js
• Use Node.js in conjunction with other powerful technologies such as Redis, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ, and LevelDB

Who this book is for

This book is for developers and software architects who have some prior basic knowledge of JavaScript and Node.js and now want to get the most out of these technologies in terms of productivity, design quality, and scalability. Software professionals with intermediate experience in Node.js and JavaScript will also find valuable the more advanced patterns and techniques presented in this book.This book assumes that you have an intermediate understanding of web application development, databases, and software design principles.

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6

Coding with Streams

Streams are one of the most important components and patterns of Node.js. There is a motto in the community that goes, "stream all the things!", and this alone should be enough to describe the role of streams in Node.js. Dominic Tarr, a top contributor to the Node.js community, defines streams as "Node's best and most misunderstood idea." There are different reasons that make Node.js streams so attractive; again, it's not just related to technical properties, such as performance or efficiency, but it's more about their elegance and the way they fit perfectly into the Node.js philosophy.

This chapter aims to provide a complete understanding of Node.js streams. The first half of this chapter serves as an introduction to the main ideas, the terminology, and the libraries behind Node.js streams. In the second half, we will cover more advanced topics and, most importantly, we will explore useful streaming patterns that can make your code more elegant and effective in many circumstances.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

• Why streams are so important in Node.js
• Understanding, using, and creating streams
• Streams as a programming paradigm: leveraging their power in many different contexts and not just for I/O
• Streaming patterns and connecting streams together in different configurations

Without further ado, let's discover together why streams are one of the cornerstones of Node.js.

Discovering the importance of streams

In an event-based platform such as Node.js, the most efficient way to handle I/O is in real time, consuming the input as soon as it is available and sending the output as soon as the application produces it.

In this section, we will give you an initial introduction to Node.js streams and their strengths. Please bear in mind that this is only an overview, as a more detailed analysis on how to use and compose streams will follow later in this chapter.

Buffering versus streaming

Almost all the asynchronous APIs that we've seen so far in this book work using buffer mode. For an input operation, buffer mode causes all the data coming from a resource to be collected into a buffer until the operation is completed; it is then passed back to the caller as one single blob of data. The following diagram shows a visual example of this paradigm:

Figure 6.1: Buffering

In Figure 6.1, we can see that, at time t1, some data is received from the resource and saved into the buffer. At time t2, another data chunk is received—the final one—which completes the read operation, so that, at t3, the entire buffer is sent to the consumer.

On the other side, streams allow us to process the data as soon as it arrives from the resource. This is shown in the following diagram:

Figure 6.2: Streaming

This time, Figure 6.2 shows you that as soon as each new chunk of data is received from the resource, it is immediately passed to the consumer, who now has the chance to process it straight away, without waiting for all the data to be collected in the buffer.

But what are the differences between these two approaches? Purely from an efficiency perspective, streams can be more efficient in terms of both space (memory usage) and time (computation clock time). However, Node.js streams have another important advantage: composability. Let's now see what impact these properties have on the way we design and write our applications.

Spatial efficiency

First of all, streams allow us to do things that would not be possible by buffering data and processing it all at once. For example, consider the case in which we have to read a very big file, let's say, in the order of hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes. Clearly, using an API that returns a big buffer when the file is completely read is not a good idea. Imagine reading a few of these big files concurrently; our application would easily run out of memory. Besides that, buffers in V8 are limited in size. You cannot allocate more than a few gigabytes of data, so we may hit a wall way before running out of physical memory.

The actual maximum size of a buffer changes across platforms and versions of Node.js. If you are curious to find out what's the limit in bytes in a given platform, you can run this code:

import buffer from 'buffer' console.log(buffer.constansts.MAX_LENGTH) 

Gzipping using a buffered API

To make a concrete example, let's consider a simple command-line application that compresses a file using the GZIP format. Using a buffered API, such an application will look like the following in Node.js (error handling is omitted for brevity):

import { promises as fs } from 'fs' import { gzip } from 'zlib' impor...

Table of contents

• Preface
• The Node.js Platform
• The Module System
• Callbacks and Events
• Asynchronous Control Flow Patterns with Callbacks
• Asynchronous Control Flow Patterns with Promises and Async/Await
• Coding with Streams
• Creational Design Patterns
• Structural Design Patterns
• Behavioral Design Patterns
• Universal JavaScript for Web Applications
• Advanced Recipes
• Scalability and Architectural Patterns
• Messaging and Integration Patterns
• Other Books You May Enjoy
• Index