This article originally appeared on LunchBadger. LunchBadger helps you build APIs in a continuous lifecycle using serverless open source.
One great perk of async/await in Node.js is how well it integrates with existing libraries. By now, most popular Node.js libraries support some sort of promise-based API, so they integrate nicely with async/await. You might even have the pleasure of removing a few dependencies from your package.json if you start using async/await instead of co. In this article, I'll show you how async/await works with mocha tests, express routes and middleware, and mongoose queries and cursors.
Mongoose 4.10.0 just landed and brings with it several powerful features and bug fixes. The most +1-ed feature in this supporting unique in array definitions via the mongoose-unique-array plugin. This feature is implemented as a separate plugin because mongoose-unique-array does much more than simply create a unique index, it also ties in to validators and versioning. In this article, I'll explain how to use mongoose-unique-array and the caveats you need to be aware of when using it.
pkg is Zeit's (the company behind Next.js) new tool for bundling Node.js projects into standalone binary executables. A standalone executable has numerous advantages: as long as you're on a compatible OS, you can run the executable without installing Node.js, docker, or any other runtime. You can ship your executable to a vanilla EC2 instance and run it without any extra setup, no need to maintain AMIs or use Packer. You can also cross-compile with pkg, so you can build an OSX-compatible executable on your Linux box and vice-versa. In other words, pkg gives you the best parts of Golang in Node.js.
Next.js is a powerful framework for building server-side rendered applications. Next.js is just a wrapper around React, but it abstracts away all the ugly bits of React: build systems, transpilation, routing, CSS, etc. Most importantly, it makes server-side rendering with React dead simple, no need to carefully structure your code for use with preact-render-to-string or figure out the lastChild pattern for replacing the server-side rendered component with the client-side rendered component. In this article, I'll show you how to build a basic Next.js app with server-side rendering on top of an Express and MongoDB API.
Async/await makes it easy to integrate asynchronous behavior with imperative constructs like for loops, if statements, and try/catch blocks. Unfortunately, it doesn't do the same for functional constructs like forEach, map, reduce, and filter. Using these constructs with async functions leads to behavior that can seem downright baffling. In this article, I'll show you some common gotchas for async functions with JavaScript's built-in functional array methods and how to work around them.
Firebase is a great tool for getting data from a server to a client. Firebase handles caching, retries, socket management, and all the other unpleasant details of getting data to a client with spotty internet connection. In particular, Firebase is excellent for mobile web and mobile apps. In this article, I'll walk you through using Firebase with Preact, a lightweight React alternative, to build a simple app with server-side rendering.
