Socket.io Tag

Top 10 npm packages for Node.js framework

Node is a leader in the asynchronous framework market. The platform now supports a huge portion of startups and businesses that are earning hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Thus, it establishes itself as a platform that can sustain a huge load, whilst retaining smooth performance. Node.js was perhaps the biggest revelation of modern server engineering that we saw. By the looks of it, Node isn’t stopping any time soon; it’s the exact opposite. The project continues to push out frequent updates and maintains old releases to support older platforms. A new release secures some loopholes in OpenSSL, but also adds more support for languages like C and C++.

Starting with Node.js is a fairly easy process; the guidelines are outlined and thousands of projects are sitting on GitHub, waiting for you to inspect and analyze their architecture. Node.js works great on all platforms, even on Windows 10, for those who are interested. That makes it a truly great platform to begin learning front-end and back-end development together. Let’s not forget that Node has the most populated package manager of any framework or language known to man. Thus, building a website takes only a couple of minutes, thanks to the modules and libraries that are available through the package manager(NPM). So let’s get started with the topmost packages of nodeJS.

Express

Pic courtesy: medium.com

All common programming languages share similar structures in the way things are built. One of the fastest ways to get a programming language to serve your needs is through a framework. Express is the leading Node.js framework for quickly creating and publishing applications and APIs. The framework’s minimal structure allows any Node.js developer to quickly launch a functional application with the use of Express Generator. Express gives you a solid outline to build your apps on top of. Combine it with any of the other packages we will discuss, and you will quickly realize just how amazing this framework truly is.

PM2

Pic courtesy: medium.com

Node.js is known for being the framework to use for scaling large applications, and infrastructure. Process management should be an essential priority for any Node.js user. PM2 offers both process management for production applications, and a load-balancer to help with any possible performance tweaks. With PM2, your applications stay online indefinitely, giving you the tools to reload apps without having to experience any sort of downtime. Is it a surprise that hundreds of thousands of Node.js users consider this an essential tool to have?

Mocha

Pic courtesy: medium.com

Even more asynchronous action going on here in this Node.js package roundup, this time we have Mocha – a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on Node.js and the browser, making asynchronous testing simple and fun. Mocha tests run serially, allowing for flexible and accurate reporting, while mapping uncaught exceptions to the correc t test cases. Testing is so important to understand how well the application is performing, where we can locate any particular leaks, and also to know how we can improve these bugs, problems, and irritations that we experience. Testing lets developers to understand better how their code performs, and in turn learn more skills as they continue down their chosen path.

Lodash

Pic courtesy: medium.com

A modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance & extras. Lodash makes JavaScript easier by taking the hassle out of working with arrays, numbers, objects, strings, etc. Lodash’s modular methods are great for:

• Iterating arrays, objects, & strings
• Manipulating & testing values
• Creating composite functions

ESLint

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ESLint is a static code analysis tool for identifying problematic patterns found in JavaScript code. Rules in ESLint are configurable, and customized rules can be defined and loaded. ESLint covers both code quality and coding style issues. Inshort the goal is to make code more consistent and avoiding bugs. In many ways, it is similar to JSLint and JSHint with a few exceptions:

• ESLint uses Espree for JavaScript parsing.
• ESLint uses an AST to evaluate patterns in code.
• ESLint is completely pluggable, every single rule is a plugin and you can add more at runtime.

Passport

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Passport is a unique authentication module for Node.js devs. The main goal of Passport is to help with authentication requests, this Passport achieves through the use of third-party plugins that act as authentication methods, otherwise known as strategies. The Passport API is straightforward, you give Passport a request that you need to authenticate, the Passport in turn gives you the hooks that let you control what happens after an authentication call fails, or succeeds. Exploring the Strategies, there are hundreds of authentication methods to choose from, starting from internal ones, all the way up to external ones like Google, Facebook, and others.

Moment

One of the most stable & maintained time manipulation libraries you can find. In the whole collection of libraries, created to solve the issues of formatting, parsing, converting and, generally, working with different forms of time, Moment.js is the one that has seen the widest adoption.

import moment from "moment";
// in relation to release date of this post
moment().format("MMMM Do YYYY"); // June 6th 2019
moment("20111031", "YYYYMMDD").fromNow(); // 8 years ago
moment().subtract(10, "days").calendar(); // 05/27/2019

With its latest v2 release, Moment.js got rewritten, to support latest ES6 syntax. This brings improved modularity and better performance for always-green browsers. Such things are important, especially when dealing with a library as big as Moment.js.

Chalk

With Chalk, we’re entering the world of terminal-related tools and libraries, where a number of downloads, and thus popularity, go crazy! Chalk is an extremely simple library, created for one, simple purpose – styling your terminal strings! Just like with Require – it proves that the most useful things are also the simplest ones.

import chalk from "chalk";
// string concatenation - template literals
console.log(`${chalk.blue("Hello")} World${chalk.red("!")}`);
 
// chainable API
console.log(chalk.blue.bgRed.bold("Hello world!"));

Of course, the API is simple, intuitive (chainable) and it works really well with all features that JS has to offer natively. The official page of the packages states that it’s used by more than 20K different packages! Maybe that’s where the weekly downloads count comes from (~25M). Even though, such numbers cannot be ignored.

Socket.io

Socket.io is just happened to get early access to the Nodejs package that allows you to build a truly real-time communication application that would require real-time streams of data content, either directly from the data that you are working with, or through an Application programming interface(API) that comes from another source. Some example apps like Twitter, they deployed a bot for collecting the latest tweets and on Facebook, bot for watching the news, thus with the combinations of APIs to explore some interesting things that work with data in real-time.

Request-Promise

Request is designed to be the simplest way possible to make http calls. It supports HTTPS and follows redirects by default. You can also stream a file to a PUT or POST request. Although it’s deprecated still the most useful package for network calls. few usages are listed below,

• Crawl a webpage
• GET/POST something from a JSON REST API
• POST like HTML forms do (also with Include a cookie)
• Get the full response instead of just the body

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Socket.io – easy way to handle WebSockets

The era of static websites has passed. Now users demand dynamic content and application like look and feel. Instead of constantly reloading the page and hitting F5, the page should adjust itself automatically. Many of this can be accomplished with simple asynchronous requests from javascript. But what if you want to update your app only when there is a new data available on the server?

You could send a ton of requests in a loop but that’ll use a lot of bandwidth and with more users could potentially DDoS your server or make it very slow. Web technologies are constantly evolving so it’s not exceptional that we have a solution for this problem. It’s called WebSockets.

Websockets allows us to establish a stateful connection between browser and server so we can exchange pieces of information in both directions. It’s more efficient than standard request and response cycle from HTTP.

Unfortunately, WebSockets are handled differently on different browsers so it’s not easy to implement the cross-browser code. And how about older browsers that don’t support WebSockets? We need some kind of wrapper that will work on different browsers and fallback to polling techniques on older ones. Socket.io does exactly that and also provides nice API and many additional features like broadcasting.

Installation

Socket.io is split into two components client and server libraries. Both written in javascript. I assume that you have nodejs and npm installed. If not just follow instructions on the internet.

Create a directory for server code and run npm init to create package.json file for the project. Next, add the socket.io library to your project by running

npm install --save socket.io

We’ll also need express library to make things simple. Installation is as simple as typing

npm install --save express

Echo server

Let’s start with something simple.

I think echo server should be enough to demonstrate how easy it is to use socket.io, you can easily extend this example to something more complex.

Create a file called server.js and paste this code.

var http = require('http')
var express = require('express')
var socketio = require('socket.io')
var app = express(server)
var server = http.Server(app)
var io = socketio(server)

app.get('/', function(req, res){
  res.sendFile(__dirname + '/index.html')
});

io.on('connection', function(socket){
  socket.on('echo', function(data){
    socket.emit('echo', data);
  });
});

server.listen(8080); 

server.js

On first three lines, we require libraries that we are going to use. Next, we create HTTP server and express application to be able to define routes easily. You can find more about express framework on its website https://expressjs.com/ . Also, we need to create an instantiate socket.io and assign it to the server to allow WebSocket communication.

In the next line, we are using express to define root route (‘/’) to return the content of index.html file. We will store our client code there just to make things really simple. After that, we use previously created io object to listen on connection event. Every time someone connects to the server via socket.io it’ll trigger the callback function. Inside connection callback, we have access to a socket that is connected to the client. From here we can emit events or listen to them.

Let’s listen to echo event and resend the same payload by emitting echo event to the client. Note that the name echo is our custom event’s name. We don’t need to declare it anywhere so that’s convenient. The last line actually starts the server to listen on port 8080.

Client code

Create index.html file in project’s root directory and paste the following code.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset=utf-8 />
<title>Echo server</title>
<script src="socket.io/socket.io.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var socket = io();
socket.on('echo', function(data){
console.log(data);
});
socket.emit('echo', 'this is a message');
</script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

The first thing you want to do is to include socket.io library. The file will be served from nodejs server so you can access it. We are adding javascript inside HTML just to make this really simple but you shouldn’t do that in production code.

Inside the code we are creating a connection to the socket.io server by calling io() function. Next, we are emitting echo event with test as a payload. Now just start the server with nodejs server.js and connect to it by accessing 0.0.0.0:8080 from your browser. You should see the this is a message message in the console immediately.

Conclusion

I think that the most important skill for a software developer is to quickly adapt to new technologies and to always pick the right tool for the task.

Socket.io is really nice and simple. It allows us to easily consume WebSockets in any application. It’s great to have it in the toolbox.

Top 3 most popular Node.js frameworks for 2018

Enhancing JavaScript capability for server-side scripting, Node.js Framework development has come to the forefront among the programming languages in 2018. Node.js brought a noteworthy move, of running JavaScript outside the browser which is largely acknowledged by the JavaScript developers. Being technology contributors we are already aware of the Node.js backend development and web application development capability.

Due to its distinguished features, Node.js is high on the demand of backend developer community and technology giants. Major features consist of the single-threaded event loop and asynchronous and non-blocking input/output processing. Using this primary features and approaches of Node.js, many performance-driven frameworks are being innovated.

These Node.js frameworks can be leveraged to speed up development cycles and gear up the power of Node.js development, In addition, these frameworks also let you to craft real-time end to end web applications without any other third party app server, web server, technology or tool.

Here, we are describing 3 top Node.js frameworks that have extended the core functionality of Node.js with latest features and will be emerging rapidly in 2018.

Express.js

Express.js is one of the most important web application development frameworks for Node.js and has brought Node.js to next level. It is a flexible and minimalist Node.js web framework for developing robust web applications and mobile app programming interfaces.

Express.js is incorporated applicable features, like simplified multiple routing, database integration, template engines and so on. Moreover, Expert Node.js Developers can also write extension or plugins or packages for express. Well-known websites and apps such as Geekli.st, MySpace, Yummly, Klout, and Segment.io are built in Express.js.

Express gives the flexibility to use any template engine conforming to the signatures, any user authentication scheme, and any third party database. It helps you to define the project directory structure the way you want.

Meteor

Meteor is powerful open source MVC Node.js framework for developing web and mobile applications. The framework lets you build real-time applications for both client and server. Meteor mainly supports Linux, Windows, and macOS.

You can create an application with fewer JavaScript code using reactive programming model offered by Meteor. Some of the popular applications like Blonk a Job search application and Respondly a team collaboration app are built using Meteor.

Meteor has the DDP protocol which lets you connect to anything in the backend, like enterprise data warehouse and a simple database, to the IoT sensors. Meteor can quickly integrate with MongoDB.

Metro is having good demand in the market as per its 28K+ stars on GitHub and huge supportive community. Everything in meteor works seamless and out of the box.

Socket.io

It is the best server and Node js web framework for creating real-time web applications, allowing event-driven interaction between a node.js server and a browser. It performs as a server-side library for node.js and as a client-side library in the browser.

The prime features of Socket.io comprise binary streaming, asynchronous input/ output (I/O) processing, and instant messaging and more. It allows real-time concurrency for the need for document collaboration.

The framework is compatible with every operating system, device, and browser. Top technology companies including Microsoft, Trello, Yammer, and Zendesk have been using this framework.