Node JS

For no particular reason I thought I'd have a stab at Node.js today. I'm a bit curious and keen to see what all the fuss is about. Much (I suspect) like a lot of web devs out there I'm good at JS and jQuery (I even dabbled in prototype and YUI) but would've call myself a JavaScript pro! Today I just wanted to get a Hello World out the door and then later try and find out a bit more and perhaps get more advanced.

Install
So I must have read a dozen different tutorials today and every one of them is different. The official note.js site has an instillation guide https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installation but I found it a bit daunting, so I pieced a few together.

I'm on Ubuntu so I downloaded the node-v0.10.7.tar.gz file from http://nodejs.org/ and unpacked it to a new directory.

Then I opened up a console and simply typed:

sudo make install

This took a while as Ubuntu busied itself, but that was it, pretty simple.
You can verify everything is running by typing

node --version

Get Started

Then I created a directory under /var/www/ and the obligatory Hello World file:

console.log("Hello World - All your base belong to me");

Then, still in the console I moved to my new application directory and executed my file:

node helloworld.js

That was it! Easy as pie so far!