Question

I’m playing around with nodejs and specifically looking at nowjs

I’ve got now up and running on a server running node and I have a separate web server. I successfully have the node server returning the client script and I reference this on the web server. This returns a 200 response code and all looks well. However I get javascript errors telling me that ‘now’ is undefined. As far as I understand it the ‘now’ variable should be available via the client script but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Does anyone know if this set-up is possible? So the set-up is similar to the below pseudo code

 //Server 1 node.com
 if(request.url === '/nowjs/now.js'){
      var file = 'path_to_clientlib/now.js';
  fs.readFile(file, function(e, data) {

        if (e) {
           throw e;
        }

         response.writeHead(200,{'Content-Type': 'application/javascript'});
          response.end(data);
}

and server.com

   <script src="/jquery.js"></script>
   <script src="http://node.com/nowjs/now.js"></script> <!-- This is returned properly -->
   <script>
   $(document).ready(function(){

    now.receiveMessage = function(name, message){
      $("#messages").append("<br>" + name + ": " + message);
    }

   $("#send-button").click(function(){
     now.distributeMessage($("#text-input").val());
     $("#text-input").val("");
   });

   now.name = prompt("What's your name?", "");

   });
   </script>

  <div id="messages"></div>
  <input type="text" id="text-input">
  <input type="button" value="Send" id="send-button">

Straight away the console just returns ‘now’ is not defined

Answer 1

First of all there are enough modules that provide static file serving support, but if you want to manually serve a file I would do it like this…

var mime = require('mime')   // Get mime type based on file extension. use "npm install mime"
  , util = require('util')
  , fs = require('fs');

function serveFile(filename, res) {
  var filePath = process.cwd() + filename;
  var stat = fs.statSync(filePath);

  res.writeHead(200, {
     'Content-Type':mime.lookup(filePath),
     'Content-Length':stat.size
  });

  var readStream = fs.createReadStream(filePath);

  return util.pump(readStream, res);
}

// Your code...

Or check out the module node-static on NPM or Github

About how to use NowJS (from the docs)

On the server

var httpServer = require('http').createServer(function(req, response){ 

  // See code above how to serve static files...

});

httpServer.listen(8080);

var nowjs = require("now");
var everyone = nowjs.initialize(httpServer);

everyone.now.logStuff = function(msg){
  console.log(msg);
}

On the client

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://localhost:8080/nowjs/now.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">
  now.ready(function(){
    // "Hello World!" will print on server
    now.logStuff("Hello World!");
  });
</script>