Making HTTPClient requests

Another way to mitigate computationally intensive code is to push the calculation to a backend process. To explore that strategy, we'll request computations from a backend Fibonacci server, using the HTTPClient object to do so. However, before we look at that, let's first talk in general about using the HTTPClient object.

Node.js includes an HTTPClient object, which is useful for making HTTP requests. It has the capability to issue any kind of HTTP request. In this section, we'll use the HTTPClient object to make HTTP requests similar to calling a REST web service.

Let's start with some code inspired by the wget or curl commands to make HTTP requests and show the results. Create a file named wget.js, containing the following code:

const http = require('http');
const url = require('url');
const util = require('util');

const argUrl = process.argv[2];
const parsedUrl = url.parse(argUrl, true);

// The options object is...