Question

One of the more difficult problems with writing systems that communicate over the network is managing input and output—that is, the reading and writing of data to and from the network, the hard drive, and other such devices. Moving data around takes time, and scheduling it cleverly can make a big difference in how quickly a system responds to the user or to network requests.

The traditional way to handle input and output is to have a function, such as readFile , start reading a file and return only when the file has been fully read. This is called synchronous I/O (I/O stands for input/output).

Node was initially conceived for the purpose of making asynchronous I/O easy and convenient. We have seen asynchronous interfaces before, such as a browser’s XMLHttpRequest object, discussed in Chapter 17 . An asynchronous interface allows the script to continue running while it does its work and calls a callback function when it’s done. This is the way Node does all its I/O.

JavaScript lends itself well to a system like Node. It is one of the few programming languages that does not have a built-in way to do I/O. Thus, JavaScript could be fit onto Node’s rather eccentric approach to I/O without ending up with two inconsistent interfaces. In 2009, when Node was being designed, people were already doing callback-based I/O in the browser, so the community around the language was used to an asynchronous programming style.

This is a book about getting computers to do what you want them to do. Computers are about as common as screwdrivers today, but they contain a lot more hidden complexity and thus are harder to operate and understand. To many, they remain alien, slightly threatening things.