This post will explain what HTTP/2 is, and how we can make use of its features in Node.js. HTTP/2 is the next version of the Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP), which adds many features and optimizations over the previous version. In the next few sections, we will understand these features in detail, and also learn how to implement them as a client and server using the Node.js http2 standard library....
This article explains what SQL database transactions are, and how to implement them in Node.js. SQL Transactions are very useful when you want to perform multiple operations on a database, but still treat them as a single unit. We will go into detail on why this is useful, and how you can use it in your Node.js applications. To illustrate our examples, we will use Postgres as our database of choice....
This post will explain the RSA algorithm, and how we can implement RSA Encryption, Decryption and Signing in Node.js using its standard library. RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) encryption is one of the most widely used algorithms for secure data encryption. It is an asymmetric encryption algorithm, which is just another way to say “one-way”. In this case, it’s easy for anyone to encrypt a piece of data, but only possible for someone with the correct “key” to decrypt it....
If you’ve ever written tests for a Node.js application, chances are you used an external library. However, you don’t need a library to run unit tests in Javascript. This post is going to illustrate how to make your own simple testing framework using nothing but the standard library. It’s actually much simpler than you may think. If you want to skip the explanation and just see the code, you can find it here...
The Node.js fs module enables us to work with the file system, which is one of the most fundamental tasks when writing programs. However, there are several ways in which we can interact with the file system using the fs module, and each method has its trade-offs. This post will explain how to use the file system module to read and write files and directories using sync, async, and streaming APIs....
In this post, we will demonstrate how JWT(JSON Web Token) based authentication works, and how to build a sample application in Node.js to implement it. If you already know how JWT works, and just want to see the implementation, you can skip ahead, or see the source code on Github The JSON web token (JWT) allows you to authenticate your users in a stateless manner, without actually storing any information about them on the system itself (as opposed to session based authentication)....
OAuth2 is an authentication protocol that is used to authenticate and authorize users in an application by using another service provider. This post will go through how to build a Node.js application to implement the OAuth2 protocol. If you just want to see the code, you can view it on Github How OAuth2 Works Let’s take a brief look at the OAuth protocol before we jump into implementation. If you’ve ever seen a dialog like this, then you’ve probably used OAuth before:...
If you’ve worked on web application development in node, it’s likely you’ve heard of express.js. Express is one of the most popular lightweight web application frameworks for node. In this post, we will go through the source code of express, and try to understand how it works under the hood. Studying how a popular open source library works, will help us make better applications using it, and reduces some of the “magic” involved when using it....
End to end testing is an often overlooked area of front-end web development. Yet, it is quintessential to making sure your application works the way it should. In this post, we will go through how to seamlessly set up and execute E2E tests using an awesome library called nightwatch.js, and in the process, automate screen capturing your application with each test run. Initial Setup Make a new project folder, and initialize your package....
NodeJs is known for its speed with respect to async tasks, but there’s still a lot of potential to make responses from your server even faster, sometimes by orders of magnitude. In this post, we are going to go through a brief introduction to the concept of caching, along with a tutorial on how to implement it using redis and an express server. What Is Caching? Normally, when you make a web server with a database, each request to the server entails one or more requests to the database, and some processing of the results before sending back a response....
