 Resources from Mark Barton in 2024

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

javascript

Leverage the power of the Google Vision API by combining NodeJS and a simple web page to extract dominant colours from any uploaded image.

In this lesson, you will learn how to set up a Express server to interact directly with the Google Vision. With this server set you, you be able to retrieve colour data from uploaded images and display it in the browser

Parse Image Files with the Google Vision API and NodeJS

Microsoft Windows is a group of several graphical operating system families, all of which are developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry.

microsoft

For a production Windows server it makes sense to run NodeJS applications as a Windows service.  This way they can be automatically restarted if the server is rebooted.

It also makes it easier to use monitoring tools like datadog to detect if there are issues with the service which is critical for production systems.

Install a Node.js Application as a Windows Service

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

node

Winston is a popular logging library for NodeJS which allows you to customise the output, as well as different logging targets.

This lesson covers configuring Winston to run with different levels depending on a Node environment variable as well as enhancing the log output to include the filename and line number the log message originates from.

Add Logging to a Node.js Application using Winston

Winston is a popular library for logging within NodeJS applications because it allows you to easily target 3rd party logging solutions, including Papertrail.

Papertrail is  hosted logging solution which is easy to get started with and can be invaluable for recording important information as well as alerting when specific errors occur within your NodeJS applications.

NodeJS Logging using Winston and Papertrail

To stop having to change configuration settings in production code and to stop secure information like usernames and password being stored in source control its a good idea to use local configuration files.

This lesson explains how to read in the local configuration, how to perform a check to make sure the required variables are present and how you might communicate an example configuration file to other team members.

Setup Local Configuration with Node.js Applications

Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.

express

To replicate your production application its helpful when developing a local NodeJS Express application is running under SSL. 

There are some web technologies which do not play nicely with standard http and its likely to become more common e.g. Web Push Notifications.

This lesson will show you how to create a local SSL certificate for localhost and then convert it into a format that will work with Express.  It will also show you how to make sure that Chrome will trust it.

This lesson is for Windows as it uses a powershell command, as well as the Microsoft Management Console (MMC)
 

Create Local SSL Certificates for an Express App on Windows

Use can use colour and styles to make it easy to spot errors and group common functionality into blocks when viewing a NodeJS console.

This lesson will show how to enhance an Express application to highlight errors, display setup issues to developers and group together output using the color npm package, both in the console and Papertrail which is a hosted logging service.

We use the [Colors package](https://github.com/Marak/colors.js) in this lesson.

Some other lessons which are mentioned in this video are:

* [Add Logging to a Node.js Application using Winston](node-js-add-logging-to-a-node-js-application-using-winston)
* [NodeJS Logging using Winston and Papertrail](javascript-nodejs-logging-using-winston-and-papertrail)
* [Setup Local Configuration with Node.js Applications](node-js-setup-local-configuration-with-node-js-applications)


Using colours in a NodeJS terminal - make your output pop!

This lesson will help get you started on using [handlebars](http://handlebarsjs.com) templates with Express.

We start with a basic Express application and build out an example HTML invoice using an default layout and template.

We then inject some data into the template and finally cover creating a simple helper.

We only touch on built in helpers but more can be found at [Handlebars Block Helpers](http://handlebarsjs.com/block_helpers.html).

The example application uses Winston logging and a lesson on that can be found [here](https://egghead.io/lessons/node-js-add-logging-to-a-node-js-application-using-winston)

We don't cover any package installs so use the Github code to get a list of the required packages from npm.


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Mark Barton