Node.js – Jeff Linwood

Building an API with Visual Studio Code and Node.js

At the April Austin Microsoft Developer Meetup, I gave a talk about using Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code to build web applications and API’s with Node.js. I also showed everyone how to quickly and easily deploy those Node.js web applications to Microsoft Azure’s App Services.

We used both Express and Hapi to build web applications – one was a simple Hello World web application, and one was a simple API that returned meetups as JSON.

This was a fun presentation to give – there was a lot of discussion with the whole group, as we talked about some interesting areas of Node.js, Azure, and Visual Studio Code – for instance, we found out that VS Code has support for conditional breakpoints for Node.js (right click on the breakpoint, select edit, and then set your condition), and we spent some time digging through the Azure Portal for logging.

Ushahidi Module for Node.js

If you’re using the Ushahidi platform for information collection and visualization, you may want to build external applications that integrate with Ushahidi using their REST API. Their API is pretty straightforward to use, but it’s nice to have various wrappers set up to use the API from different languages. Because the project I was helping out with (https://github.com/kwhinnery/responder) used Node.js, there was a need to build out an integration/API wrapper for Node.

I wrote a Node.js module (ushahidi), which you can find the source code for on GitHub: (https://github.com/jefflinwood/ushahidi-node). Npm is probably the easiest dependency management system to publish a component with – it’s built into the tool, and there are no hoops to jump through other than creating an npmjs.org account.

I’m looking for new use cases for the module, and/or ways to improve it, so if you are using it, let me know what I can do to make it better!