Node.js the Right Way

Implementing a Messaging Protocol

We’ve just explored how to create socket servers that listen for incoming connections in Node. So far, our example programs have sent plain-text messages that are meant to be read by a human. In this section, we’ll design and implement a better protocol.

A protocol is a set of rules that defines how endpoints in a system communicate. Any time you develop a networked application in Node, you’re working with one or more protocols. Here we’ll create a protocol based on passing JSON encoded messages over TCP.^[13]

JSON is incredibly prevalent in Node.js programming and in JavaScript programming generally. We’ll use it extensively for data serialization and configuration throughout the book. JSON is significantly ...