Does nodejs make html pages faster? - javascript

If I have nodejs serve every file on my website, does it load faster than just plain HTML? Say, for instance, I had a site with loads of pictures. Does having expressjs serve them make the content load faster on page load?

No.
Nodejs has an http server module 'baked-in', but it's not necessarily faster than using any other HTTP server like Apache or Nginx.
In fact, you're likely to have Apache or Nginx fronting Node so that you can enable multiple domains on any given server.
If you're looking for blazing fast HTML service, you should look into cacheing your HTML pages in-mem using something like Redis.

No. It is more likely to make it slower since your application won't be optimised (compared to most HTTP servers) for serving static content.

Related

A question about how web applications work and how server-client is implemented

This is kind of a weird question I think to ask, but I have browsing about for the past some time and cannot find a clear definite answer.
I understand that a client connects to its own server and communicates with the web-server through sockets and I kind of see how that works in php (I have never used php but have used sockets before so I understand the concept).
The issue is I'm trying to get a real view of this.
The question is, do websites generally use sockets and contact a web-server to fetch data or the actual html? Or is it a rare choice made in some areas?
If it is generally used, then is the "real" js usually in the server? or is it client-side (for performance sake)?
Context:
Let me explain a bit where I'm coming from, I'm not a web expert, but I am a computer engineering student so most concepts are easy to understand. A "real"-er view of this would be very helpful.
Now, onto why I'm asking this. I'm developing a web-app as part of a project and have done a fair bit of progress on it but everything was done on a local dev server (so basically a client?)
I've started wondering about this because I wanted to use a database for my website and since I want to connect to something, I will need to connect to a web-server first (for security sake).
My question's intent is to guide me on how and most importantly, where, to setup this server.
I don't think showing any code would be of help here, but assume I have my client running on localhost:1234, my database on localhost:3306, I think I should have a web-server on another port so I can establish this communication, but I want to do it in a clean and legitimate way so all of my current solutions can be ported online with little to no changes (except the obvious)
There's a bunch to unpack here.
First of all, servers can be distant or local. Usually they are distant, local server are mostly used for development purposes.
Even if your server is on your local machine, it still isn't the client. The client is the part that is connecting to your server. For web development it is usually the user browser.
Javascript is a language that can be used server-side, with a NodeJS server, but more often client-side, in your user browser.
Your website, or web application, communicate with your server through various means. Most common one is the HTTP protocol, used to make server requests such as data request to populate your page (in case of an API server, REST or otherwise), or simply request the actual page to display in the browser. The HTTP protocol works by resolving URLs, and making requests to your server registered to this url using special methods such as GET, POST, DELETE, etc...
Sockets are used to create a persistent connection with your server that works both ways. It is mostly used for realtime updates, such as a live chat, as it allows you to push updates from the server instead of having the client request everything.
In most cases the database can be found on the same server as the one serving the website or application, as it is a lot easier to handle, and often faster without the extra networks requests to get the data. However it can be placed on another server, with it's own API to get the data (not necessarily web related)
Ports such as 1234 or 3306 are often used for local development, however once your move your project to a host service, this is usually replace by urls. And the host service will provide you with a config to access the associated database. Or if you are building your own server you might still use ports. It is heavily dependent on your server config.
Hope this clear some things up.
In addition to #Morphyish answer, in the simplest case, a web browser (the client) requests an URL from a server. The URL contains the domain name of the server and some parameters. The server responds with HTML code. The browser interprets the code and renders the webpage.
The browser and the server communicates using HTTP protocol. HTTP is stateless and closes the connection after each request.
The server can respond with static HTML, e.g. by serving a static HTML file. Or, by serving dynamic HTML. Serving dynamic HTML requires some kind of server language (e.g. nodejs, PHP, python) that essentially concatenates strings to build the HTML code. Usually, the HTML is created by filling templates with data from the database (e.g. MySQL, Postgres).
There are countless languages, frameworks, libraries that help to achieve this.
In addition to HTML, the server can also serve javascript that is interpreted in the browser and adds dynamics to the webpage. However, there could be 2 types of javascript that should not be mixed. NodeJS runs on the server and formats the server response, client javascript runs on the browser. Remember, client and server are completely isolated and can communicate only through an HTTP connection.
That said, there ways to make persistent connections between client and server with WebSockets, and add all kinds of exotic solutions. The core principle remains the same.
It does not matter if server software (e.g apache, nginx) is running on your local machine or anywhere else. The browser makes a request to an address, the DNS and network stack figures out how to reach the server and makes it work.

Node JS Http Server Production Ready

I am building a simple web service using node js, I only use the built in web server feature using:
var server = http.createServer(handleRequest);
I added a caching mechanism using node-cache, but that's it, I run the script via PM2 to make sure it's always running. Is this a safe and good practice to do? I saw some posts mentioning using nginx as reverse proxy server, won't that add an extra step that will slow things down?
Thanks!
It's recomended to use nginx as a frontier in production for secure reasons, load balancing, static content output and administration issues. In some cases it could be used for API versioning.

Do Node.js-hosted files have their code exposed?

I apologize for what might seem like a really dumb question based on a limited of Node.js but please know I am attempting to learn all I can. That being said, as I understand it, Node.js is similar to Apache or IIS. What types of files does it actually serve though (ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, HTML, etc.)?
My IMPRESSION is that it serves JavaScript and HTML by recommendation? In such a case, if I write a JavaScript file used on the server side to write data to my database, is my code exposed to the end user?
My scenario for example is that I would write an HTML5 page with JavaScript to write to a database but if that is served by Apache or IIS then both the HTML and JavaScript have their code exposed. How does this work with Node.js, do I need to stay with PHP for securing my code?
Thank you!
As long as the server-side javascript isn't served to the requesting user you're safe. So no, the database stuff within nodejs won't be served.
That's like asking if PHPs or javas database code get served if someone requests a page (only if the code is read and echoed).
Node.js is a server-side scripting language with modules for interacting with HTTP requests and responses.
You can serve literally any kind of file with Node (as you could with other server-side scripting languages), and in fact, probably want to go out of your way not to let people grab any files they want.
PHP won't secure your code for you. Normally, nginx or Apache helps to protect against threats, but a Node.js server running on a port completely bypasses all of that unless you specifically configure nginx or Apache to forward requests to the port your node program is listening on.

Serving static resources with Flask - running afoul of Same-origin policy

I’m having trouble serving static files (image assets, etc.) for a small game I’m working on in Phaser. I’m using flask-socketio on the server (and socket.io on the client-side) for networking which is why I’m trying to get this working under Flask. As far as I can tell, I must use Flask to serve the static resources because otherwise I run into the problem of the Same-origin policy.
Indeed, I tried serving the assets with nginx on a different port but I got this message in my browser console (Safari in this case): SecurityError: DOM Exception 18: An attempt was made to break through the security policy of the user agent.
I looked in the Flask documentation on how to serve static files and it said to use “url_for.” However, that only works for HTML template files. I’m trying to load the static resources inside my javascript code using the Phaser engine like so (just for example):
this.load.image('player', 'assets/player.png’); //this.load.image('player’, url);
where I cannot obviously use ‘url_for’ since it’s not a template file but javascript code.
So my question is, how do I serve my static resources so that I don’t violate the same-origin policy?
Is there another secure way to serve static resources in Flask besides using ‘url_for’?
Or should I be using nginx as a reverse proxy? In the flask-socketio documentation I found this nginx configuration snippet: Flask-SocketIO documentation (please scroll down to where it says "Using nginx as a WebSocket Reverse Proxy”)
Regarding #2, I don’t quite understand how that should work. If I should be doing #2, can someone kindly explain how I should configure nginx if Flask is listening on port 5000? Where in that snippet do I configure the path to my static assets on the filesystem? And in my javascript code, what url path do I use to reference the assets?
Normally, one would set up Nginx (or some other general web server) on the "main" port, and then configure it to forward certain requests to your application server (in this case, Flask) on a secondary port which is invisible/unknown to the client browser. Flask would provide the result to Nginx which would then forward the result to the user.
This is called a reverse-proxy, and Nginx is widely considered a good choice for this setup. In this way, all files are served to the client by Nginx, so the client doesn't notice that some of them actually come from your application server.
This is good from an architectural standpoint, because it isolates your webapp (somewhat) from the client, and allows it to conserve resources, e.g. by not serving static files and by having Nginx cache some of the webapp's results when it makes sense to do so.
If you're doing development, this may seem like a lot of overhead; but for production it makes a lot more sense. However, it is a good idea to have your dev environment mimic your prod environment as closely as possible.

How to solve JavaScript origin problem with an application and static file server

In a system that I'm building I want to serve
Static files (static HTML pages and a lot of images), and
Dynamic XML generated by my servlet.
The dynamic XML is generated from my database (through Hibernate) and I use Restlets to serve it in response to API calls. I want to create a static file server (e.g. Apache) so that this does not interfere with the dynamic server traffic. Currently both servers need to run on the same machine.
I've never done something like this before and this is where I'm stuck:
The static HTML pages contain JavaScript that makes API calls to the dynamic server. However, since the two servers operate on different ports, I get stuck with the same origin problem. How can this be solved?
As a bonus, if you can point me to any resources that explain how to create such a static/dynamic content serving system, I'll be happy.
Thanks!
You should setup mod_proxy in apache to forward dynamic requests to whatever backend server you are using. Your existing setup (ie. two separate ports) is perfect, you just need to tell apache 'proxy dynamic requests to my backend server without letting the browser know'.
This page should get you started - http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_proxy.html
You need to load a script tag from the Reslet server... have a look at JSONP and this SO post

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