What are the best practices of Nodejs for application development in 2020?

We mostly covered some of the best practices of the Nodejs platform for web development. Curious to know them? Without further delay,

let’s jump in!

Nodejs has played a vital in the broad spread popularity of JavaScript. The popularity of Nodejs, based on event-loop, a run-time environment that built on Google Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. This particular parameter attributed to fast and efficient in producing a better development environment. 

The platform is fair enough to start building scalable real-time web applications. Once after moving beyond the core functionality, one should be aware of dealing with errors and some possible hiccups in development. 

Thus, finding the best practices of Nodejs for various workflow-based scenarios like how to construct the best structure for your code? How you fix bugging issues? And so on. So the right practices make all the difference between a launch error and a solid production Nodejs application.

Let’s see some important practices of Nodejs for application development to bring most out of your application:

BEST PRACTICES OF NODEJS FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

USE OF EVENT MODULE

The first and foremost important practices of Nodejs is its usage of events module, which is an integral part of the Nodejs core. Nodejs comes with a function called EventEmitter class. This function can be included in the ‘events’ module. A simple way to implement events in Nodejs is by enclosing the event.

Read: What is event emitter in Nodejs?

For example:

var events = require('events'),

myEventEmitter = new events.EventEmitter();

var knockdoor = function knockdoor () {

   console.log('knock knock knock');

};

myEventEmitter.on('doorOpen', knockdoor);

myEventEmitter.emit('doorOpen');

NPM – A BLESSING

Nodejs is gifted to have npm with it. Considered as the blessing to the Nodejs developers. While discussing best practices or features of Nodejs, no one can simply ignore NPM. It establishes itself as the best library dependencies manager. Node Package Manager is important for all deployment systems for Nodejs.

Read: Nodejs: What’s great about Node Package Manager(NPM)?

It is the basics for many of the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) providers for Nodejs. NPM is clear, simple, dependable package management has let the Node ecosystem grow extremely well in recent years. Till there are 60,000+ npms available to scale your app to the next level. This NPM helps you to do some interesting things and keeps your code simple as that.

USE FUNCTIONAL INHERITANCE

JavaScript supports inheritance which is when objects inherit from other objects. The class operator was added to the language with ES6. However, it is openly complex compared to functional inheritance. Most Nodejs experts prefer the simplicity of the latter. It’s implemented by a simple function factory pattern and doesn’t require the use of prototype, new or this. Since there are some indirect effects when you update the prototype where the functional inheritance of each object uses its copy of methods.

Here the sample code to express the functional inheritance:

exports = module.exports = createApplication;

// ...

function createApplication() {

  var app = function(req, res, next) {

    app.handle(req, res, next);

  };

  mixin(app, EventEmitter.prototype, false);

  mixin(app, proto, false);

 app.request = { __proto__: req, app: app };

  app.response = { __proto__: res, app: app };

  app.init();

  return app;

}

CACHE REQUESTS

This is one among DevOps’ best Nodejs practices, that allows you to get most out of your Node instances. This is the only way to make Node servers to do app functions like making requests, processing data and executing business logic. So simply offload the traffic to static files to another web server such as Apache HTTPD or Nginx. Thus, you probably should use Docker for the set up:

FROM

Nginx

COPY

 nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

I prefer Docker compose to make multiple containers like Nginx, Node, Redis, MongoDB work with each other. For example:

web:

  build: ./app

  volumes:

    - "./app:/src/app"

  ports:

    - "3030:3000"

  links:

    - "db:redis"

  command: pm2-docker app/server.js

nginx:

  restart: always

  build: ./nginx/

  ports:

    - "80:80"

  volumes:

    - /www/public

  volumes_from:

    - web

  links:

    - web:web

db:

  image: redis

HANDLE ERRORS PROPERLY

This is particularly one of the key Nodejs practices, favorably useful for beginners. Before starting a project, one should keep in mind that even one unhandled error in Node can crash the entire process. As per the experts’ suggestion, handle all the error properly, and remove them with proper message. 

The use of block-like try-catch may slow down your process. So, try to avoid it. In addition to that using process.on(‘uncaughtException’) is not advisable. It may protect your node from crashing, but still, the error will remain unhandled.

CONCLUSION

Nodejs is considered as one of the most popular platforms for developers. The open-source, free software has allowed many back-end developers to make the jump to full-stack development.

We hope that the above-mentioned Nodejs best practices help you in a great way and to produce better and more efficient code.

‍So, don’t forget to pick up a free consultation from our Nodejs experts. Don’t wait!! Contact us for more information regarding the Nodejs web development, so come on let’s collaborate effortlessly.