Node.js in Practice

Chapter 5. Streams: Node’s most powerful and misunderstood feature

This chapter covers

• What streams are and how to use them
• How to use Node’s built-in streaming APIs
• The stream API used in Node 0.8 and below
• The stream primitive classes bundled since Node 0.10
• Strategies for testing streams

Streams are an event-based API for managing and modeling data, and are wonderfully efficient. By leveraging EventEmitter and Node’s non-blocking I/O libraries, the stream module allows data to be dynamically processed when it’s available, and then released when it’s no longer needed.

The idea of a stream of data isn’t new, but it’s an important concept and integral to Node. After chapter 4, mastering streams is the next step on the path to becoming ...