Almost every company in the industry, including Netflix, Uber, and LinkedIn, appreciates and deploys Node.js. Here, you can discover what Node.js is, its architecture, advantages, use cases, and examples.
Did you know Node.js is the primary runtime environment for eBay and AliExpress, too? There were 23 million developers in the world in 2018, and we’re still counting. Let’s explore how Node.js is worth your time, resources, and investment in your upcoming project. Here are a few compelling use cases to explain Node.js’s various applications. For future projects, make well-informed decisions. Several large companies use Node.js, and this instilled trust in upcoming and growing companies to use the language.
What is Node.js
Node.js provides a cross-platform environment for running JavaScript applications outside of a browser. It is used to develop server-side web applications and network web applications. It is free and open source. You can download it from https://nodejs.org/en/.
JavaScript is used to write many of the basic modules of Node.js. It is mostly used to run real-time server applications.
Its official documentation provides the following definition: The Node.js platform uses Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for building fast, scalable network applications. As a result of its event-driven, non-blocking I/O model, Node.js is lightweight and efficient, making it ideally suited for real-time, data-intensive applications that are distributed across multiple devices.
A rich library of JavaScript modules is also provided with Node.js to simplify web application development.
How Does Node.js Work?
Any application will have a frontend with which the user interacts while there will be many things happening in the backend or background of it. Every application is made up of three parts, the frontend with which users interact, the backend server, and the backend database. Backend servers can be NodeJS, Java, Python, etc., and backend databases can be relational or non-relational.
Whenever a client requests something from the client side of the application, what happens is that the request is sent to the server, which then processes or calculates the validation request, and after a response has been sent to the client, all such validation has been completed. For all such calculations and processing, JavaScript’s NodeJs framework is used.
Our web applications are mostly run outside the client’s browser using NodeJS, an open-source and cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment. It is used for server-side applications. It is also used for I/O intensive applications such as video streaming sites, online chatting applications and many others
Several established tech giant companies and newly formed start-ups use the NodeJs framework. The current version of NodeJs is v16.9.0, which was created by a guy named Ryan Dahla in 2009.
Exactly what is the purpose of Node.js?
One of the main reasons why Node.js is used is that it provides speed. Data processing, client-server interaction, development, and progression are all carried out quickly. As a result, Node.js allows two-way, event-driven communication between the client and server. Due to its unique I/O approach, Node.js excels in situations where we’re increasingly asking our web servers to scale and respond in real time.
Node.js is also fast and lightweight, and it supports JavaScript code on both the front and back ends. As a result of the frontend and backend flexibility, our developer community will be more efficient and cross-functional.
See More: What is JavaScript – Which type of language is JavaScript?
Features of Node.js
The following are some of the features that make Node.js the first choice for software architects.
- Extremely fast: Node.js is built on Google Chrome’s V8 JavaScript Engine, so it executes code very quickly.
- Asynchronous and event-driven I/O: Node.js APIs are asynchronous, i.e. non-blocking. As a result, Node.js-based servers don’t wait for API responses. A notification mechanism of Node.js Events helps the server to get a response from the previous API call before moving to the next API. It is also one of the reasons why it is so fast.
- Using single-threaded programming: Node.js uses a single-threaded programming model with event looping.
- Scalable: Node.js has the advantage of being highly scalable because it responds in a non-blocking manner due to its event mechanism.
- No buffering: By using Node.js, you can upload audio and video files more quickly. A Node.js application never buffers any data. These applications simply output the data in chunks.
- Open source: Node.js has an active open-source community that produces many excellent modules to extend its functionality.
- There is no licensing agreement for Node.js. It is released under the MIT license.
Final Thoughts
Node.js is a popular programming environment for building large-scale applications that need to support multiple concurrent requests. Because of its single-threaded non-blocking I/O, it is also ideal for real-time and streaming applications and boasts a massive community of active developers along with the world’s largest open-source package repository, NPM, which presently contains over a million packages.
Hopefully, this article was able to inform you about the importance, features, and how we can use Node.js in software development.
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