We’ve used Node.js (specifically with a framework called Sails.js) at work for a number of projects but I never really felt I properly understood one of Node’s fundamental concepts, that of the callback. It’s absolutely pervasive throughout Node and I was able to muddle on through at work without totally grasping it, but it wasn’t ideal.
Back at the end of January I decided to try rewriting my website using Node.js (it’s currently written in Perl using the Mojolicious framework) as a learning experience. It’s now almost two months later and my site is actually completely rewritten with Node/Sails (sans tests, which are currently being written; I know about test-driven development but I wasn’t about to start bashing my head against failing to understand how to get the tests to do what I wanted on top of learning a whole new language :P) with all the same functionality of my Perl one, and although I’m still far from an expert I actually feel like I have a proper handle on what’s going on.
The problem I found when trying to find examples was that they were all very contrived; I felt like they were missing fundamental underlying parts that apparently everybody else was able to understand but I couldn’t. For me, the “ah ha” moment was this post on Stack Overflow about using callbacks in your own functions. It didn’t assume anything or use an example of some module that apparently everyone is already familiar with (the most common one was fs.read() to read data from the filesystem). Once I had that straight, it was full steam ahead. It’s also significantly easier to deal with Javascript objects compared to Perl’s array/hash references.
My actual live website at virtualwolf.org is still on the old Perl version, but I don’t want to put the Node one up until I’ve actually got it properly covered with tests. Speaking of tests, I’m using a thing called Istanbul for code coverage, the reports it generates look like this, and it’s really satisfying having the numbers and bars go up as your coverage increases. It’s basically gamification of tests, really!
All in all, I’m pretty pleased!