Sending data between different systems, be it threads, processes, or even other computers, is what we do as developers. There are many tools we can use to do this, and we have looked at most of them. Just remember that while one option can appear to make an application simple, that doesn't always mean it is the best choice. When it comes to breaking our systems up, we usually want to assign a specific job to a unit and use some form of IPC, such as named pipes, to communicate. If we need to move that task to another computer, we can always switch it out for TCP.

With these IPC and web protocols under our belt, we will be able to tackle most problems with ease in Node.js and to write both the client-side and server-side code when it comes to web applications. However, Node.js isn't just built for web applications. We can pretty much do anything that other languages can and even have most of the tools that these other languages have. This chapter should have helped to clarify that and helped solidify how Node.js can be built into an already developed application ecosystem.

With all of this in mind, we will be looking at streaming and how we can implement our own streams in Node.js.