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Mobile development and Node.js

In an earlier post on Node.js, you saw how it can really improve the productivity by using it’s standalone JavaScript runtime to execute the scripts. The Node.js home page provides a six liner example of creating a simple Web server that can process HTTP requests, using it’s API. The piece of code is shown below.

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
  res.end('Hello World');
}).listen(1337, '127.0.0.1');
console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/');

Execute this script and you have a web server up and running in few seconds.

This ready made, extremely light-weight web server has been very useful while developing and testing mobile applications. Number of times, you have to communicate with the server and exchange data, from a mobile device or an Android/iOS device simulator. Setting up a server like tomcat/IIS just for this purpose has been really painful and a tedious process.
Node.js has made this job, easy. Creating a web server, tweaking it to behave the way you want, make it deliver the response that your application needs, all these have become very agile.

I have started using this Node.js server for playing with new stuff and it has made learning more enjoyable as you can get to the point faster than before.

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2 Responses

  1. Nitya

    How about deploying? Can we deploy configuration related changes? etc?

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