gyp, short for "Generate Your Projects", is a build system written by Google that was specifically designed to build their Chromium web browser.gyp makes it easy to develop such a large project because the developers can create and test each piece individually by defining self-contained "targets". Then at Release-time, gyp makes it easy to stitch the "targets" together into a single statically linked executable. Ryan Dahl once called it "the module-system of C".

I am going to walk through several examples of using C++, but first lets look at what a Node.js Module written in Javascript that provided an equivalent class would look like.

Here's a little long polling example that I have thrown together while playing around with node.js. I must say it's a pretty slick tool. Anyone familiar with JavaScript suddenly can create powerful server side applications.

With node.js and socket.io we can enjoy better performance, a bidirectional push communication between a server and a JavaScript client and even the support for all the browsers. Socket.io can work with several transports in order to support even old browsers like IE6 (RiP(.

There is no official document that governs the style of node.js applications. This guide is my opinionated attempt to bring you a good set of instructions that will allow you to create beautiful and consistent software.

A little while back I bemoaned the state of server technology for secure websockets, as I was at the time putting in work on a Socket.io side project that needed to be HTTPS only. In due course that led a later post to outline a server setup that involved Stunnel and Varnish as the frontend proxies. It was a little Rube Goldberg, but worked nonetheless.

npm is awesome as a package manager. In particular, it handles sub-dependencies very well: if my package depends on request version 2 and some-other-library, but some-other-library depends on request version 1, the resulting dependency graph looks like...