w8d1 - Node Day but today...

    It’s hard to believe that we’re starting Week 8 already. Today was the last project before starting our Final Projects, and it was all about Node.js. Node is a way of using javascript on the back end to asynchronously interact with the client side. The benefit to using an asynchronous server is that it can handle input from clients without blocking input for other clients. It lends itself to doing “event driven programming”, which was evident today as we built a basic chatroom application.

    Event driven programming is a very different way to approach programming, and unlike most of the things that we’ve seen in the course so far. The day started off challenging, but once I got the hang of it, I got into a groove and enjoyed trying to work everything out. It’s basically a juggling act between the client side and the server side, and all of it revolves around triggering events on one side and listening for them on the other side. Every time you want to add in a new feature, you have to think about how you will trigger the event, and then how you will handle the event on the other side. Unfortunately, we won’t have time to explore Node.js any further, but I definitely found it interesting and will probably look into it some more in the future.

    Final Project underway…