Ok. I admit it. Writing an RTL from scratch has been one of the hardest tasks I have ever undertaken. Thankfully I have not been alone, but since I am the lead developer for the RTL, it naturally falls on me to keep track of the thousands of classes it comprises; how each affect the next, the many inheritance chains and subsequent causality timelines that each namespace represents.

We were the first company in the world to do this, to establish the compiler technology and then author a full RTL on top of that – designed to wrap and run on top of the JavaScript virtual machine. To be blunt, we didn’t have the luxury to looking at what others had done before us. For every challenge we have had to come up with solutions ourselves.

Be that as it may, after seven years we have gotten quite good at framework architecture. So whenever we need to deal with a new runtime environment such as node.js – we have already built up a lot of experience with async JSVM development, so we are able to absorb and adapt much faster than our competitors.

Digging into a new platform

Whenever I learn a new language, I typically make a little list of “how do I do this?” type questions. It can be simple, like writing text to stdout, or more elaborate like memory mapped files, inheritance model, raw memory access and similar topics.

But one of the questions have always been: how do I enumerate files in a folder?

While this question is trivial at best, it stabs at the heart of the sub structure of any language. On operating systems like Linux a file is not just data on a disk like we are used to from Windows. A file can be a socket, a virtual access point exposed by the kernel, a domain link, a symbolic link or a stream. So my simple question is actually motivated to expose the depth of the language im learning. I then write down whatever topics come up and then research / experiment on them separately.

Node, like the browser, executes code asynchronously. This means that the code you write cannot be blocking (note: node does support synchronous file IO methods, but you really don’t want to use them in a server. They are typically used before the server is started to load preferences files and data).

As you can imagine, this throws conventional coding out the window. Node exposes a single function that returns an array of filenames (array of string), which helps, but it tells you nothing about the files. You don’t get the size, the type, create and modify timestamps – just the names.

To get the information I just mentioned you have to call a function called “fs.stat”. This is a common POSIX filesystem command. But again we face the fact that everything is async, so that “for / next” loop is useless.

Luke Filewalker

In version 3.0 of Smart Mobile Studio our Node.JS namespace (collection of units with code) has been upgraded and expanded considerably. We have thrown out almost all our older dependencies (like utf8.js and base64.js) and implemented these as proper codec classes in Smart Pascal directly.

Our websocket framework has been re-written from scratch. We threw out the now outdated websocket-io and instead use the standard “ws” framework that is the most popular and actively maintained module on NPM.

We have also implemented the same storage-device class that is available in the browser, so that you can write file-io code that works the same both server-side and client-side. The changes are in the hundreds so I wont iterate through them all here, they will be listed in detail on the release-notes document when the time comes.

But what is a server without a fast, reliable way of enumerating files?

Well, here at the Smart Company we use our own products. So when writing servers and node micro-services we face the exact same challenges as our customers would. Our job is to write ready solutions for these problems, so that you don’t have to spend days and weeks re-inventing the wheel.

Enumerating files is handled by the class TNJFileWalker (I was so tempted to call it Luke). This takes care of everything for you, all the nitty-gritty is neatly packed into a single, easy to use class.

Here is an example:

The class also expose the events you would expect, including a filtering event where you can validate if a file should be included in the final result. You can even control the dispatching speed (or delay between item processing) which is helpful for payload balancing. If you have 100 active users all scanning their files at the same time -you probably want to give node the chance to breathe (20ms is a good value).

The interface for the class is equally elegant and easy to understand:

Compare that to some of the spaghetti JavaScript developers have to live with just to perform a file-walk and then do a recursive “delete folder”. Sure hope they check for “/” so they don’t kill the filesystem root by accident.

const fs = require('fs'); const path = require('path'); function filewalker(dir, done) { let results = []; fs.readdir(dir, function(err, list) { if (err) return done(err); var pending = list.length; if (!pending) return done(null, results); list.forEach(function(file){ file = path.resolve(dir, file); fs.stat(file, function(err, stat){ // If directory, execute a recursive call if (stat && stat.isDirectory()) { // Add directory to array [comment if you need to remove the directories from the array] results.push(file); filewalker(file, function(err, res){ results = results.concat(res); if (!--pending) done(null, results); }); } else { results.push(file); if (!--pending) done(null, results); } }); }); }); }; function deleteFile(dir, file) { return new Promise(function (resolve, reject) { var filePath = path.join(dir, file); fs.lstat(filePath, function (err, stats) { if (err) { return reject(err); } if (stats.isDirectory()) { resolve(deleteDirectory(filePath)); } else { fs.unlink(filePath, function (err) { if (err) { return reject(err); } resolve(); }); } }); }); }; function deleteDirectory(dir) { return new Promise(function (resolve, reject) { fs.access(dir, function (err) { if (err) { return reject(err); } fs.readdir(dir, function (err, files) { if (err) { return reject(err); } Promise.all(files.map(function (file) { return deleteFile(dir, file); })).then(function () { fs.rmdir(dir, function (err) { if (err) { return reject(err); } resolve(); }); }).catch(reject); }); }); }); };