While utilizing the Unix domain sockets/Windows named pipes are great, there are a couple of differences between the two systems. Node.js tries to hide these details so that we can focus on the applications that we want to write, but they still show up. Two of the most common causes that can trip up new developers are as follows:
- Windows named pipes will automatically be destroyed when the application quits. Unix domain sockets will not. This means that when we exit our application, we should try to utilize the fs module and unlink the file through the unlink or unlinkSync methods. We should also check to see whether it exists when we start up, just in case we don't exit gracefully.
- Windows' framing of data can be larger than the Unix domain sockets. This means an application can appear to work on Windows but will fail on Unix systems. This is why we created the framing system that we did. It is good to keep this in mind, especially when we might want to use external libraries to handle parts of building the IPC systems. Some of these systems do not keep this idea in mind, and bugs can easily creep up because of this.
Node.js aims to be completely cross-operating system compatible, but these systems always have slight quirks when it comes to actually operating across systems. If we want to make sure that it works, just like we have to do if we can't guarantee what browser our end users will use, then we need to test it on all of our systems.
While developing server applications that span a single computer is common, we still need to hook all of these applications up. When we are no longer able to utilize a single computer, we will need to talk over the network. We'll take a look at these protocols next.