Classes and patterns in Node.js

This week we had the awesome Node.js 6.0.0 release! With the 6.0.0 release Node.js has 93% of the ES6 features implemented. In this short post we will look at few particularly interesting features including “classes in JavaScript”, while this aspect is a little bit controversial with the purists it nonetheless allows us to write some clean code.

If you want to install Node.js 6 easily I would recommend n. With n setup, installing it was as easy as running (on a Debian based distro) -

sudo /home/rockyj/bin/n stable

We can now have a simple npm setup where we will demostrate some new Node.js features like classes, destructuring and default parameters and using them we will create the Singleton and Factory pattern. Here is the code -

lib/singleton.js

class Singleton {
  constructor(initial) {
    this.seed = initial
  }


  increment() {
    return this.seed += 1
  }
}


const instance = new Singleton(0);


module.exports = {
  instance: instance
}

test/singleton_test.js

const Singleton = require('../lib/singleton')
const assert = require('chai').assert


describe('Singleton', function () {


  it('always has one instance', function () {
    const instance1 = Singleton.instance
    assert.equal(1, instance1.increment())
    assert.equal(2, instance1.increment())


    const instance2 = Singleton.instance
    assert.equal(3, instance1.increment())
  });


  it('always has one instance surely', function () {
    const instance3 = Singleton.instance
    assert.equal(4, instance3.increment())
  });


});

lib/factory.js

class Fenster {
  constructor({width = 10, height = 10} = {}) {
    this.width = width
    this.height = height
  }


  area() {
    return this.width * this.height
  }
}


function createFenster (options) {
  return new Fenster(options)
}


module.exports = createFenster

test/factory_test.js

const createFenster = require('../lib/factory')
const assert = require('chai').assert


describe('Fenster', function () {


  it('creates an instance', function () {
    const f1 = createFenster()
    assert.equal(100, f1.area())
  });


  it('calculates the right area', function () {
    const f2 = createFenster({width: 20, height: 10})
    assert.equal(200, f1.area())
  });


});

As evident with the code, Node.js just keeps getting better and better. One thing to note is ES6 modules/import/export are still not there because that could lead to a tons of npm packages being outdated / needing updates. So for now Node.js will stick to CommonJS module system. Hope this was useful, have a great weekend!