Node.js is beating all odds to become the most popular platform for developing server-level applications in recent times. Just so you missed the cue, we referred to Node.js as a platform and not a language, tool, or framework. So what exactly is Node.js? What is the reason behind its increasing popularity?
Contrary to the common perception that Node.js is a server-side programming language or a framework, it is essentially a runtime environment that is used to build server-side applications quickly and efficiently. Very similar to the Java runtime environment (JRE), Node.js is a runtime environment for JavaScript-based applications. Just as JRE has JVM for cross-platform functionality, the JavaScript Virtual Machine (JsVM) generates machine code for JavaScript-based applications for code deployment across platforms.
As JVM has Java libraries, Node.js also has a set of libraries called Node API or Node modules in the Node Package Manager (NPM) to help run JavaScript-based applications during the runtime.
Parallelly we can say that NodeJS is a V8 engine, an open-source, JavaScript engine from Google. This means that like JRE, this V8 JsVM also has JIT and GC as its main components for handling runtime compilations and memory management.
The web architecture using Node.js is once again similar to that of Java-based application architecture. However, the only difference that arises is in regards to client request processing which is asynchronous single-thread handling in the case of Node.js. With a Java-based application, the client requests are handled synchronously, in a multi-threaded manner.
As mentioned in the earlier sections, many libraries called Node modules are available for developing Node.js-based web applications, however, typically all the frameworks/libraries used in tandem with Node.js are all JavaScript-based as well.
When we look at the web architecture in the picture below, we can observe that the client-side is developed using Angular JS, Express JS is used for presentation and service layers, and for the backend, MongoDB is used. This is an ideal architecture of MongoDB, Express JS, Angular JS, Node.js (MEAN) stack.
Node.js is taking popular programming languages like PHP and Java head-on in the backend web application development space due to many reasons. Mentioned below are the various reasons:
Node.js is arguably the top platform used today for server side programming using JavaScript. Therefore, the reasons to use Node.js are:
NodeJS is not recommended for CPU-intensive applications.
Node.js is currently a powerful JavaScript-based runtime environment used extensively to develop chat applications, video streaming websites, IoT applications, social media applications backend, etc. A few of its use cases are
Now that the industry trends are quite evident from the above examples, why do you want to choose Node.js for your web application development? Still unclear? Approach us to get a complete understating of why Node.js could be a right fit for your organization.