A focus on error handling — I’ve crashed more Node processes in production than I’d like to admit. Thankfully, I’ve then learned how to build robustness into my Node applications. So, what can you build into your applications to keep yourself informed of errors and ultimately keep your applications running? “Robustness” encompasses many aspects of application…

Promises, Generators, and Other Approaches — We know it most endearingly as “callback hell” or the “pyramid of doom”: doAsync1(function () { doAsync2(function () { doAsync3(function () { doAsync4(function () { }) }) }) Callback hell is subjective, as heavily nested code can be perfectly fine sometimes. Asynchronous code is hellish when it becomes overly complex…

A focus on types — Regardless of your background in web development, you’ve likely used a web template system (engine). The goal of a template system is to process templates (usually in combination with a set of input data) to form finalized web pages. template(data) => final HTML Although some engines are designed specifically for…

A look at WebSocket modules — Node arrived on the scene around the time the WebSocket protocol was drafted. Node’s fast, evented approach to server-side programming was a perfect pairing for WebSocket. Out of that marriage emerged the popular socket.io framework: an instant favorite used heavily in the first Node Knockout competition. Now that WebSocket is…

Handling Node.js Memory Leaks in Production — In the beginning, there were memory leaks in JavaScript … and we could’ve cared less. Then there was Ajax … and we started to care. Then there were these long-running Node processes on our production servers … and we really cared a lot! Node memory leaks happen. Usually they occur…

Functional programming and flow control — In the last article on promises, we focused on the Promises/A+ specification and Q implementation of promises. We learned the benefits of using promises over raw callbacks. …

An alternative to callbacks — Promises provide a compelling alternative to raw callbacks when dealing with asynchronous code. Unfortunately, promises can be confusing and perhaps you’ve written them off. However, significant work has been done to bring out the essential beauty of promises in a way that is interoperable and verifiable. …