Node.js is pretty awesome! I encountered the asynchronous JavaScript based web server platform when working on a specialization about (network) communication. As a demo I wrote a basic web server vote/polling system where people can vote on one page and see the polls rise and fall on another page. Data sending and retrieval was almost on the fly available through the use of Socket.IO’s “websockets”.

Of course this is a demo which means that there is still (a lot of) room for improvements. I’ve used to save the statistic values because it was a mandatory part of the assessment.

Working

So how does the Node.js application work? To start the application index.js has to be run trough node.js command prompt.

When a resource is requested the following process starts. Pathname is everything that comes after localhost:1337/ ( localhost:1337/[pathname]).

When a websocket connection is established.

When the webserver receives new form data.

The HTML pages

Conclusion & Resources

I hope this post gives a nice overview of the vote/poll application. Node.js and Socket.IO are pretty cool technologies that I will surely use in future projects!

The Node Beginners Book was a very useful resource for getting started with Node.js.