Mongoose 4.13 was released last week. As usual, its packed with powerful new features. The most exciting new feature is the ability to set localField, foreignField, and ref dynamically for virtual populate. The syntax for virtual populate's dynamic properties is slightly different than the one for conventional populate, but we think this new syntax is much more powerful.
One of the most compelling reasons for async/await is the fact that async functions generally feel like simplified threads, or threads with predictable interrupts. There are numerous
I previously wrote about handling the database server going down with the MongoDB Node.js driver.
In Mongoose 4.8 we added support for
GeoJSON is a powerful standard for
Too often, MongoDB REST API developers don't think about handling database outages until they have an outage in production. Usually you can get away with this because version 2.x of the MongoDB Node.js driver does most of the work for you: it handles attempting to reconnect and can buffer operations for you so you don't get errors during a temporary outage. However, the MongoDB Node.js driver has a lot of tunable options and corresponding subtleties that you need to be aware of. In this article, I'll cover the basics of what happens when your backend MongoDB topology goes down for single server and replica sets, so you can configure the driver to do the right thing for your use case.
You might remember locking from your undergrad systems programming class. Locks are what you use when multiple threads want to access the same chunk of memory, and you don't want one thread to clobber the other's data. You don't have threads in Node.js, but that doesn't mean you can ignore concurrency, because your Express server might get conflicting requests at roughly the same time. In this article, I'll describe how you can leverage promises and async functions to enforce the constraint that only one instance of a given function runs at a time.
