Learning Node

Chapter 12. Graphics and HTML5 Video

Node provides numerous opportunities to work with several different graphics applications and libraries. Since it’s a server technology, your applications can make use of any server-based graphics software, such as ImageMagick or GD. However, since it’s also based on the same JavaScript engine that runs the Chrome browser, you can work with client-side graphics applications, such as Canvas and WebGL, too.

Node also has some support for serving up audio and video files via the new HTML5 media capabilities present in all modern browsers. Though we have limited capabilities with working directly with video and audio, we can serve files of both types, as we’ve seen in previous chapters. We can also make use of server-based technologies, such as FFmpeg.

No chapter on web graphics would be complete without mentioning PDFs at least once. Happily for those of us who make use of PDF documents in our websites, we have access to a very nice PDF generation Node module, as well as access to various helpful PDF tools and libraries installed on the server.

I’m not going to exhaustively cover every form of graphics or media implementation and management capability from Node. For one, I’m not familiar with all of them, and for another, some of the support is still very primitive, or the technologies can be extremely resource intensive. Instead, I’ll focus on more stable technologies that make sense for a Node application: basic photo manipulation with ...