Preface

The internet is no longer a collection of static websites to be passively consumed. The browser (and mobile) user has come to expect a much richer and interactive experience. Over the last decade or so, network applications have come to resemble desktop applications. Also, recognition of the social characteristics of information has inspired the development of new kinds of interfaces and visualizations modeling dynamic network states, where the user is viewing change over real time rather than fading snapshots trapped in the past.

Even though our expectations for software have changed, the tools available to us as software developers have not changed much. Computers are faster, and multicore chip architectures are common. Data storage is cheaper, as is bandwidth. Yet we continue to develop with tools designed before billion-user websites and push-button management of cloud-based clusters of virtual machines.

The development of network applications remains an overly expensive and slow process because of this. Developers use different languages, programming styles, complicating code maintenance, debugging, and more. Very regularly, scaling issues arrive too early, overwhelming the ability of what is often a small and inexperienced team. Popular modern software features, such as real-time data, multiplayer games, and collaborative editing spaces, demand systems capable of carrying thousands of simultaneous connections without bending. Yet we remain restricted to frameworks designed to assist us in building CRUD applications, binding a single relational database on a single server to a single user running a multipage website in a browser on a desktop computer.

Node helps developers build more resilient network applications at scale. Built on C++ and bundled with Google's V8 engine, Node is fast, and it understands JavaScript. Node has brought together the most popular programming language in the world and the fastest JavaScript compiler around, and has given easy access to an operating system through C++ bindings. Node represents a change in how network software is designed and built.