I am Joshua Johanan and this is a blog about writing code

This is a talk I gave for a local Meetup about node.js. I cover building an Express-like package from scratch. It does not have all the features of Express and is not ready for production. It does show you how to build a package including testing. The example package is at https://github.com/johanan/example-simple-app. The project in the video is at https://github.com/johanan/Local-Variables-Dec-2014. You may have to turn the volume up as it was recorded from the audience.

I wrote a book! I am little biased, but I feel you will enjoy this book. The name of the book is Building Scalable Apps with Redis and Node.js. If you have enjoyed any of my posts so far (and even if you did not) you will like this book. You will not need expert knowledge in any of these frameworks to benefit from this book. It will show you what you need to know about each framework and most importantly, how all the frameworks work together in a single application.

I have created a short video where I demonstrate using Ansible and docker together. I create a new droplet and Digital Ocean and create a working copy of my blog about 7 minutes. The best part is that it is completely reproducible. I will cover everything in the video in depth over the next few weeks.

This blog has had a long and generally boring history. It started off on an old computer in my basement. This was in late 2011. I then needed to upgrade Ubuntu. This lead me to move the site into the cloud on Amazon EC2. It was a standard LAMP server running Ubuntu 12.04. That was three years ago and I needed to upgrade to the next Ubuntu LTS. To move to the new server I created an Ansible playbook to setup the server and Docker to run the site.

This has been adapted from the source to better fit my blog’s presentation and has a few typos fixed, which means that there are a few typos in the book :(. Using Socket.IO and Express together We previously created an Express application. This application is just the foundation. We are going to add features until it is a fully usable app. We currently can serve web pages and respond to HTTP, but now we want to add real-time communication.

What is React React is a new library for building user interfaces (to steal it directly from their site) developed by Facebook. React is not a full featured JavaScript application framework. This means it is not competing in the same space as Angular, Ember, Backbone or <insert your favorite framework that I am not mentioning here>. It also means it does not care how you route, where you get your data, or any application plumbing.

Bower Bower is a package manager like npm. In much the same way as npm, Bower needs Node.js and runs on top of it. While npm focuses on packages for Node.js, Bower usually targets front-end libraries like jQuery and React. Managing front-end libraries is much better than the old way of just downloading a version and sticking it in our project. We now have full version control. Bower uses a configuration file named bower.