Punathil Gireesh - Building Production-Ready Web Apps with Node.js

All those who took the time and had the patience to introduce me to the vast expanse of software engineering and its secret recipes of man-machine interactions, my known and unknown ancestors from whom I derived creativity with perseverance, my elder brother Sanal Kumar, who discovered my potential in computer science and channelized it, and my wife Savitha and children Parvathi and Adithya for their relentless support.

Gireesh Punathil is a member of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee and an architect in IBM India Software Labs. In his 20-year career, he has been porting, developing, and debugging cloud platform components, web servers, language runtimes, virtual machines, and compilers. Gireesh graduated with an Electrical Engineering degree from Calicut University and is an IBM Master inventor who holds several patents on workload optimization and in related areas. He has also spoken at several international conferences, sharing his knowledge on Node.js and Java.

Dhruti Shah is a multi-skilled, tech savvy person with over 14 years of experience in education and training in Information Technology. She holds a Master of Computer Applications (MCA) degree from South Gujarat University and is a Microsoft Certified Training Specialist who has trained more than 2,000 candidates worldwide on over 10 technologies.

With a keen sense of technological advancement, she has self-acquired working knowledge of several technologies, including Java, .NET, PHP, Linux, SQL Server, MySQL, and Node.js. She has authored books on these technologies for educational institutions and also conducted webinars on technical subjects for international clients in Nigeria, Vietnam, and Trinidad.

She has been appreciated as a model representative of India for flawlessly managing two prestigious international collaboration projects to set up and upgrade the Centre of Excellence in Information Technology in Panama and Costa Rica, Latin America.

There is almost always the collective wisdom, with catalysts and motivators behind any achievement, although the author is the only visible part. I would like to thank my family for not only encouraging me for writing this book, but also sacrificing their personal time to give way for my work on this book, constantly reminding me of the timelines and rejuvenating and pushing me forward!

I am grateful to the Node.js communitythe large number of known and unknown contributors, my fellow collaborators, my peers in the technical steering committee, and the OpenJS foundationfor providing me with a platform for experiencing the large and complex domain of web application, making a great shift from being largely involved in the lower-level stack components like language runtimes, virtual machines, compilers, and operating systems. I would like to thank them for encouraging me to write the book and reviewing it for the necessary legal aspects.

I am thankful to my employer organization IBM, which taught me the art of learning, interpreting, analyzing, synthesizing, and presenting software in its fundamental form.

Sincere thanks to Dhruti Shah for her thorough and valuable technical review of this book.

And finally, I am extremely grateful to BPB Publications, who contacted me and proposed this book with abundant confidence in me, without any experience of working with me on prior engagements but purely based on my open-source profile! This means a lot to me and is an exemplary embodiment of catalysts and motivators being behind every achievement.

It is an empirically proven fact in computer science that there is no single solution, language, platform, framework, or tool that can solve all computational problems. Instead, a suitable combination is carefully selected based on the characteristics of the workload. This means it is possible to find a language L1 that is better suited for a specific workload than another language L2, a framework F1 that works better for it than framework F2, and so on and so forth.

For example, the C programming language is used to develop device drivers, and JavaScript is used to develop interactive web pages. The reason why these languages are chosen is obviousconstructs that are often required for developing this code are readily available and in abundance in these languages.

On the other hand, when workloads evolve and mature (foreseen to stay so for a relatively long period), languages, tools, and frameworks are seen to be developed new (or evolve as well) to suit the needs of such workloads. The plethora of languages, tools, and frameworks that we see today is the result of such evolutionthe continuous innovation in the software industry to improve the stated purpose of the business that runs these workloads.

Most modern workloads run on Cloud. A minimum common behavior exhibited by Cloud-hosted software is that they are accessed and consumed through a web interface. As a result, research has been performed to improve web workload efficiency. The most reasonable thing is to see how the programming platform can learn from the web characteristics and customize itself to improve developer productivity (the ability to write more code in less time) as well as machine productivity (the ability to run more code in less time).

Node.js is the successful result of such an innovation. By combining the constructs of JavaScript that enable asynchronous event-driven programming with the modern practices of developing in the open and packaging in the public, Node.js has pioneered the art of bringing exponential performance improvement and developer productivity for highly concurrent web workloads.