Node is often described as having event-driven architecture. Let’s explore what that means.

In traditional imperative programming, we give the computer a series of instructions to execute in a pre-defined order. In contrast, when we write web applications, we often need to write logic to handle situations without knowing exactly when they’ll occur. For example, when programming a website, we might provide functionality for a click event without knowing when a user will trigger it. When Node was created, it applied this same concept of event-driven principles to the back-end environment.

Node provides an EventEmitter class which we can access by requiring in the events core module:

// Require in the 'events' core module
let events = require('events');

// Create an instance of the EventEmitter class
let myEmitter = new events.EventEmitter();

Each event emitter instance has an .on() method which assigns a listener callback function to a named event. The .on() method takes as its first argument the name of the event as a string and, as its second argument, the listener callback function.

Each event emitter instance also has an .emit() method which announces a named event has occurred. The .emit() method takes as its first argument the name of the event as a string and, as its second argument, the data that should be passed into the listener callback function.

let newUserListener = (data) => {
  console.log(`We have a new user: ${data}.`);
};

// Assign the newUserListener function as the listener callback for 'new user' events
myEmitter.on('new user', newUserListener)

// Emit a 'new user' event
myEmitter.emit('new user', 'Lily Pad') //newUserListener will be invoked with 'Lily Pad'

Let’s create an event emitter!