1. Do you know how to debug node.js applications?

There's a few tools and ways out there:
Interactive Stack Traces with traceGL - Shareware

Guide here

Profiling with Profiler

Install globally npm install -g profiler
Start your process with node --prof this will create a v8.log file
Build nprof by running ~/.nvm/v0.8.22/lib/node_modules/profiler/tools/build-nprof
Run ~/.nvm/v0.8.22/lib/node_modules/profiler/nprof this will read the v8.log profile and give you nice ouput

CPU and Memory Profiling with NodeTime

Install to your app npm install nodetime
Include in your app require('nodetime').profile()
Follow the instructions it will output to console

Alternatively, you may want to use look, which is based on nodetime but doesn't send data to nodetime.com.
Blink (formerly Webkit) Developer Tools Debugging with Node Inspector

Install it globally: npm install -g node-inspector
Run your app in debug mode: node --debug-brk your/node/program.js (or attach to a running process: kill -s USR1 <your node process id>)
In another terminal window run node-inspector: node-inspector
Open http://127.0.0.1:8080/debug?port=5858 (or debug remotely by replacing 127.0.0.1 with your host; make sure port 8080 is open)

Webkit Developer Tools Profiling with Node Webkit Agent

Install to your app npm install webkit-devtools-agent
Include in your app agent = require('webkit-devtools-agent')
Activate the agent: kill -SIGUSR2 <your node process id>
Access the agent via the appropriate link

Interactive Cloud9 Debugging

Guide here

Heapdumps to Webkit Developer Tools

Tool and guide here

Logging Libraries that output Debugging Information

Caterpillar
Tracer

Flamegraphs with Dtrace and StackVis

Only supported on SmartOS

Flamegraphs with Chrome Developer Tools

Coming soon

Benchmark

with Apache Bench: ab -n 100000 -c 1 http://127.0.0.1:9778/
with wrk

2. Do you know how to get POST query in express node.js?

Things have changed in express 3.0.

Firstly you need to add some middleware to parse the post data of the body.

Add one or both of the following lines of code:

app.use(express.json()); // to support JSON-encoded bodies
app.use(express.urlencoded()); // to support URL-encoded bodies

Then, in your handler, use the req.body object:

// assuming POST: name=foo&color=red <-- URL encoding
//
// or POST: {"name":"foo","color":"red"} <-- JSON encoding

app.post('/test-page', function(req, res) {
var name = req.body.name,
color = req.body.color;
// ...
});

3. Tell me how to use underscore.js as a template engine?

Everything you need to know about underscore template is here. Only 3 things to keep in mind:

<% %> - to execute some code
<%= %> - to print some value in template
<%- %> - to print some values with HTML escaped

That's all about it.

Simple example:

var foo = "blahblah";
var tpl = _.template("<h1>Heading for: <= fooo %></h1>");

this would be rendered in string <h1>Heading for: blahblah</h1>

4. Are you sure node.js execute system command synchronously?

There's an excellent module for flow control in node.js called asyncblock. If wrapping the code in a function is OK for your case, the following sample may be considered:

var asyncblock = require('asyncblock');
var exec = require('child_process').exec;

asyncblock(function (flow) {
exec('node -v', flow.add());
result = flow.wait();
console.log(result); // There'll be trailing n in the output

// Some other jobs
console.log('More results like if it were sync...');
});

5. Tell me how to make an HTTP POST request in node.js?

This gets a lot easier if you use the request library.

var request = require('request');

request.post(
'http://www.abcsite.com/formpage',
{ form: { key: 'value' } },
function (error, response, body) {
if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
console.log(body)
}
}
);

Aside from providing a nice syntax it makes json requests easy, handles oauth signing (for twitter, etc.), can do multi-part forms (e.g. for uploading files) and streaming.

6. How to extract POST data in node.js?

If you use Express (High performance, high class web development for Node.js), you can do this:

HTML:

<form method="post" action="/">
<input type="text" name="user[name]">
<input type="text" name="user[email]">
<input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>

Javascript:

app.use(express.bodyParser();

app.post('/', function(request, response){

console.log(request.body.user.name);
console.log(request.body.user.email);

});

7. Can we use jQuery with Node.js?

No. It's going to be quite a big effort to port a browser environment to node.

Another approach, that I'm currently investigating for unit testing, is to create "Mock" version of jQuery that provides callbacks whenever a selector is called.

This way you could unit test your jQuery plugins without actually having a DOM. You'll still have to test in real browsers to see if your code works in the wild, but if you discover browser specific issues, you can easily "mock" those in your unit tests as well.

I'll push something to github.com/felixge once it's ready to show.

8. Tell me how to decide when to use Node.js?

You did a great job of summarizing what's awesome about Node.js. My feeling is that Node.js is especially suited for applications where you'd like to maintain a persistent connection from the browser back to the server. Using a technique known as "long-polling", you can write an application that sends updates to the user in real time. Doing long polling on many of the web's giants, like Ruby on Rails or Django, would create immense load on the server, because each active client eats up one server process. This situation amounts to a tarpit attack. When you use something like Node.js, the server has no need of maintaining separate threads for each open connection.

9. Is Node.js on multi-core machines?

Yes, Node.js is one-thread-per-process. This is a very deliberate design decision and eliminates the need to deal with locking semantics. If you don't agree with this, you probably don't yet realize just how insanely hard it is to debug multi-threaded code. For a deeper explanation of the Node.js process model and why it works this way (and why it will NEVER support multiple threads), read my other post.

10. Tell me what is the purpose of Node.js module.exports and how do you use it?

module.exports is the object that's actually returned as the result of a require call.

The exports variable is initially set to that same object (i.e. it's a shorthand "alias"), so in the module code you would usually write something like this:

var myFunc1 = function() { ... };
var myFunc2 = function() { ... };
exports.myFunc1 = myFunc1;
exports.myFunc2 = myFunc2;

to export (or "expose") the internally scoped functions myFunc1 and myFunc2.

And in the calling code you would use:

var m = require('mymodule');
m.myFunc1();

where the last line shows how the result of require is (usually) just a plain object whose properties may be accessed.

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