Node.js Weekly Update — 15 September, 2017

Below you can find RisingStack’s collection of the most important Node.js updates, projects & tutorials from this week:

Re-thinking the Node.js ecosystem for modern JavaScript

We need to rebuild most of the software infrastructure in the Node.js Ecosystem.

In order to move forward, we’re going to have to stop using a lot of the software infrastructure we rely on today but first we need solid alternatives.

What’s new in Node.js 8.5?

With the recent release of Node.js 8.5, three very exciting new features landed in the Node.js core.

In the short blogpost, you are going to learn about them:

• ECMAScript Modules in Node.js!
• Performance Hooks
• File copy with the core fs module

Using ES modules natively in Node.js

Starting with version 8.5.0, Node.js supports ES modules natively, behind a command line option. Most of the credit for this new functionality goes to Bradley Farias.

This blog post explains the details.

How To Combine a NodeJS Back End with a ReactJS Front End App

This blogpost shows how you can build the front and back end of a website using NodeJS for the back end.

We’ll use node to create endpoints, and set up a database in JSON format. Then, we’ll create a front end application using React that will post to the database, and also fetch data from it.

Understanding & Measuring HTTP Timings with Node.js

Understanding and measuring HTTP timings helps us to discover performance bottlenecks in client to server or server to server communication.

This article explains timings in an HTTP request and shows how to measure them in Node.js.

Building a crude Node.js from scratch

Node is powered by the JavaScript engine used in Google Chrome, called V81. This post is going to guide you through two steps:

• making a “Hello World” example in V8
• making a crude Node runtime with support for 3 statements: console.log, console.error and quit for quitting the process

Securing Node.js RESTful APIs with JSON Web Tokens

Have you ever wondered how authentication works? What’s behind all the complexity and abstractions. Actually, nothing special. It’s a way of encrypting a value, in turn creating a unique token that users use as an identifier. This token verifies your identity. It can authenticate who you are, and authorize various resources you have access to. If you by any chance don’t know any of these keywords, be patient, I’ll explain everything below.

This will be a step by step tutorial of how to add token based authentication to an existing REST API. The authentication strategy in question is JWT (JSON Web Token). If that doesn’t tell you much, it’s fine. It was just as strange for me when I first heard the term.

ES2017’s async/await is the best thing to ever happen to JavaScript

Async await is part of the ES2017 standard, in node since version 7 and all current browsers.

• await - is a way to await until a promise has returned a value (resolved). Error handling is plain old JavaScript: if something breaks (ie, a promise rejects), an Error is thrown. On the next line, you can just use the value like any other. No more .then().
• async - a thing you add to the function containing the await keyword. Technically it starts a special context, practically it's a thing you need to add.

Previously in the Node.js Weekly Update

In the previous Node.js Weekly Update we read that Node.js 6.11.3 (LTS) & Yarn 1.0 got released & about Fastify, a speedy Node.js Web Framework.

We help you to stay up-to-date with Node.js on a daily basis too. Check out our Node.js news page and its Twitter feed!

Originally published at community.risingstack.com on September 15, 2017.