Mastering Node: Addons and FunctionTemplate (uuid.node)
Last night, I pushed an addition to my fork of Mastering Node. I decided to add a bit to the Addons chapter. The first example in this chapter only shows how to add a function to a natively-compiled module (i.e. an addon). This example shows you how to start a module which can be used in the following way:
var Uuid = require('./uuid.node').Uuid;
var uuid = new Uuid();
var myId = uuid.generate();
The project files referenced in the following text can be downloaded from the repo: jimschubert/masteringnode
FunctionTemplate
In v8, a FunctionTemplate is used to create the equivalent to:
var template = function() { }
The function at this point is an object and not an instance of the function.
As an example, we will use the linux package uuid to generate a uuid. We will define the header for this addon as:
[node.js] Mastering Node excerpt: Addons
Addons
The node documentation for addons is self-admittedly pretty weak as of v0.4.0.
This chapter doesn't aim to be a replacement for the official documentation. Instead, we'd hope this can expand on some of the basics a little more than a simple "Hello, World!" and drive you as a developer more on the path toward mastering node through its source code.
In fact, for now, we're only going to cover some shortcuts for creating properties on an object, functions, and interacting with function prototypes. This doesn't reach the evented level of node's awesomeness, but you should be able to look at examples in node's source and the documention for libev and libeio to find answers.
Pre-requisites
* Some C/C++ knowledge
* V8 JavaScript
* Internal Node libraries
* libev
* libeio
hello.node
Our first example is the very same one from node's docs. We're going to include it for those who haven't read through the docs and have instead trusted in the knowledge of this ebook's authors (thanks, by the way).
A node addon begins with a source file containing a single entry point:
Free Subversion Book by O’Reilly
O'Reilly Media has released a free subversion book, located at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
There is also a mercurial book available at hgbook.red-bean.com.
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