Node.js Tutorial: A Beginner’s Guide

In this tutorial, I’ll teach you the basics of Node.js. Not only will you learn what Node is and what you can do with it, but you’ll see Node in action. We’ll build a simple application for a video rental store using Node, Express, Angular and MongoDB.

At a minimum, I’m assuming you have some web development experience. So you should know a bit of Javascript, HTML, and CSS, and have some familiarity with a web application framework such as ASP.NET MVC, PHP, Python or Rails. As far as Node, Express, Angular and MongoDB are concerned, I’m assuming you’re a beginner and that’s why you’re reading this tutorial. So, I’ll cover all these technologies from the ground up. If you do happen to have some experience with Angular and MongoDB, you can read this tutorial faster.

As programmers, we have long learned that Duplication is the Ultimate Sin of programming. Even considering to duplicate something is almost unthinkable.

But removing duplication introduces dependencies. If you and I use the reuse the same piece of code instead of duplicating it, changes I make may affect you. This effect can anything from beneficial (I fixed a bug you also needed fixing) to benign (I added a new feature that you’re not using) to detrimental (I want it to work in a way that’s no good for you).

When we have dependencies, we have to think: “Perhaps I shouldn’t add that feature – what if breaks something for someone else?” “Damn the torpedoes, I’m hacking it in!” or “Perhaps I’ll just make a fork for my changes and we’ll merge later”.

While developing java web applications is very practical to have quick feedback from a “real” environment. In this post I’ll explore how to run a java web application with Maven in an embedded container be it Jetty or Tomcat.  I’ll show how I have configured them for the development of podcastpedia project backing the Podcastpedia.org website.

Source code for this post is available on Github - podcastpedia.org is an open source project.

In today’s post we are going to open our mind, step away from traditional Java EE / Java SE JPA-based stack (which I think is great) and take a refreshing look on how to access database in your Java applications using the new kid on the block: Slick 2.1 from Typesafe. So if JPA is so great, why bother? Well, sometimes you need to do very simple things and there is no need to bring the complete, well modeled persistence layer for that. In here Slick shines.

Introduction

A system of record is the authoritative data source when information is scattered among various data providers. When we introduce a caching solution, we automatically duplicate our data. To avoid inconsistent reads and data integrity issues, it’s very important to synchronize the database and the cache (whenever a change occurs into the system).

There are various ways to keep the cache and the underlying database in sync and this article will present some of the most common cache synchronization strategies.