#1: Getting started with Node.js – Simon Willison

By on 7 May, 2010 in Events, JavaScript

Thursday, 13th May 2010 (arrival from 7.15pm, for a 7.45pm start).
@The Werks, 45 Church Rd, Hove, BN3 2BE. (map)
Free entry. A voluntary donation is encouraged (£2 to £5) to support the venue.

Add yourself to the event on Upcoming, so we have an idea of numbers.

First off the mark…

Did you ever want to use your client-side skills to let rip on the server? Or are you a back-end developer who wants to add JavaScript to your server-side toolkit? Then this is the event for you.

This 90 minute workshop will provide a thorough developer’s introduction to Node.js.

About Node.js

Node is an extremely high performance server-side programming framework based on Google Chrome‘s lightning fast V8 engine. It solves the same problems as server-side tools such as PHP, Django or Ruby on Rails, using JavaScript as the programming language and with a focus on non-blocking, highly concurrent event-based I/O.

This makes it an excellent fit for problems requiring long-running connections – things like Comet, HTML5 WebSockets, large file uploads and combining results from unpredictable third party web services. As a result, Node makes an excellent complement to existing server-side technologies.

What you’ll learn

The workshop is aimed at developers with some experience of both JavaScript and basic server-side programming in a language such as PHP, Python, Ruby or ASP.NET.

It will cover the fundamentals of development with Node, then use those basic principles to build scalable solutions for real-world problems: pushing data to the browser with comet, robustly combining web services at scale, and adding rate limiting and caching to existing web applications using a Node-powered reverse proxy.

Client-side developers should come away from the session with an understanding of how they can take their existing skills and apply them to server-side development, while server-side developers should gain a powerful new set of tools for solving problems that their current platform may not be able handle.

About Simon Willison

Simon works as a technical architect for The Guardian, where he has created such successful web projects as the “MPs’ Expenses” crowdsourcing tool . Previously, he worked with Yahoo!‘s Technology Development team and the award winning Kansas newspaper, Lawrence Journal-World, where he co-created the Django Python web framework.

Simon’s interests include OpenID and decentralised systems, unobtrusive JavaScript, rapid application development and RESTful Web Service APIs. He maintains a popular web development blog at simonwillison.net. You can find him on Twitter at @simonw.

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11 Responses to #1: Getting started with Node.js – Simon Willison

  1. premasagar 7 May, 2010 at 2:03 pm #

    If you’re interested in Node, be sure to check out the awesome How To Node blog and Node mailing list.

  2. premasagar 13 May, 2010 at 5:22 pm #

    Travel directions…

    The Werks is just opposite Palmeira Square. You could walk along the seafront, or take one of the many buses that go there – see http://j.mp/plmsq

    If you’re coming from out of town, then Hove station is the closest (it’s just 10 minutes walk). Brighton Station is about 35 mins walk away, but the #6 bus goes regularly to Palmeira Square and takes about 10 mins or so.

    See you tonight!

  3. premasagar 14 May, 2010 at 11:10 am #

    What a fantastic turnout! We had a full room last night, with a great hubbub and excitement about Node and the massively scalable Comet applications it allows. There was much buzz about having our very own regular JavaScript group, to explore so many more subjects (see http://asyncjs.com/ideas to see some ideas for future sessions).

    Thanks everyone, and thank you Simon.

    The next session (27 May) will be “JavaScript Show n’ Tell”. I’ll create a new blog post about that soon.
    If you might want to lead a session, or part of one, please let me know: http://twitter.com/premasagar

    Cheers,
    Prem

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