Using node.js and jquery to scrape websites

I have been playing with Node.js for last few days and am totally head over heels.

Madly in love to this book! It’s awesome to know how much you can build with how little. I have ranted about Node.js earlier and did some comparisons too. It’s fast, really fast. And it’s plain old Javascript we have been using for last many-many years now. I thought I would build a real world application with it to see how much it stands the water. Earlier I thought to make a something on top of Riak, but that felt like running too fast. Instead I picked up something simpler to deal only with Node.js. Now, I think it would make sense to brush up on some Javascript fundaments.

Javascript objects

Yes. Javascript is an object oriented language. But it’s different from your traditional classical OO languages like Java and Ruby.

1. One obvious difference is in syntax, and the other major one is that
2. Other languages have methods while Javascript has first-class functions.

First class functions. What does it mean? It means that they are expressions and can be assigned to a variable and can be easily passed around. Does it sound like a closure in Ruby? It does indeed. Well thought, it’s a little more than that. I will come to this again some other time. For now, let’s find out how we can create objects and use them? I will focus tell you two ways to do it.