Gateway Software Symposium

April 20 - 21, 2012 - St. Louis, MO


St. Louis Marriott West
660 Maryville Centre Drive
St. Louis, MO   63141
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Mark Volkmann

Software Consultant and Partner at OCI

Mark Volkmann is a partner at Object Computing, Inc. (OCI) in

St. Louis where he has provided software consulting since 1996.

As a consultant, Mark has assisted many companies with

Java, XML, Web, jQuery and Node.js application development.

Mark also has created and teaches many courses on topics including:

Java, Swing, XML, XML Schema, Relax NG, XPath, XSLT, XQuery,

DOM, SAX, JAXP, JDOM, JAXB, SOAP, WSDL, Ruby,

HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, CoffeeScript and jQuery.

He is currently developing a course on Node.js.

Mark is a member of the St. Louis Java User Group steering

committee and a regular presenter for that group. He has written

for XML Journal and the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) magazine.

He has presented the XML DevCon, NFJS and Strange Loop conferences.



Presentations

Node.js - the core

Node is a programming environment implemented on Google's V8 JavaScript engine. Node is well-suited for implementing server applications that are primarily I/O-bound rather than compute-bound. It supports a variety of network protocols such as HTTP and TCP.

While Node's primary programming language is JavaScript, applications can be extended with code written in C and C++. It has excellent performance characteristics, in part because its performance critical underpinnings are written in C/C++. Node enables web development where the same familiar programming language, JavaScript, is used for the client and server.

Making effective use of any programming environment requires a certain amount of familiarity with it's provided libraries. Imagine trying to write a Java application without knowing what is available in the java.* and javax.* packages. Rather than "packages", Node has "modules". Provided modules are referred to as the "core modules".

This talk begins with an overview of Node. It then provides a review of the core modules including examples of commonly used functions. Armed with this knowledge, you'll be ready to begin writing Node applications.