Development With Node.js

Node.js is young and vibrant technology platform, with interesting new variations and twists popping up on a regular basis. Node.js installation has never been easier, even on Windows; the “best of breed” modules are beginning to surface from the seeming hundreds available for use; the infrastructure is becoming robust enough for production use.

Two important things to keep in mind when you work with Node.js.

Based on JavaScript

More or less the same JavaScript you’re used to working within client-side development.

Language variation

Such as CoffeeScript, but JavaScript is the lingua franca of the technology. The second important thing to remember is that Node.js isn’t your ordinary JavaScript. This is server-side technology, which means some of the functionality—and safeguards—you’ve come to expect in your browser environment just won’t be there, and all sorts of new and potentially very unfamiliar capabilities, will. Of course, if the Node.js was like JavaScript in the browser, what fun would that be?

Exploring Node.js development

Node.js technology is a server-side JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js is built on top of the Google Chrome V8 JavaScript engine, and it’s mainly used to create web applications – but it is not limited to that. Node.js is an open-source and cross-platform technology. Since its introduction in 2009, it got hugely popular and now plays a significant role in web development scene.

This is a highly scalable system that uses asynchronous event-driven I/O (input/output), rather than threads or separate processes. It is ideal for web applications that are frequently accessed but computationally simple.

How does Node.js works?

If we use a traditional web server, such as Apache, each time a web resource is requested, Apache creates a separate thread or invokes a new process in order to process the request. Even though Apache responds to requests immediately, and cleans up after the request is satisfied, this approach can still tie up a lot of resources. The popular web application is going to have serious performance issues.

Node.js, on the other hand doesn’t create a new thread or process for every request. Instead, it listens for specific events, and when the event occurs, reacts accordingly. The Node.js does not block any other requests while waiting for the functionality to complete, and events are processed on first come, first serve basis, in a relatively incomplete event loop.

How Node.js is different from other server-side languages?

Node.js is the most popular and widely used server-side framework for web apps and web application development of small, large and any size.

This technology is different from the existing server-side framework because it is based on asynchronous events through JavaScript callback functionality and uses JavaScript as a programming language. Also, everything inside Node.js runs in a single thread.

While many threads existing server-side frameworks like ASP.NET, JSP, and PHP, etc. are based on the webserver (IIS / Tomcat). In multiple thread systems, there is a limit to the maximum number of threads, beyond which throughput is reduced.

The following are problems with multi-threaded systems:

• During the heavy workload, a multi-threaded web server consumes large amounts of memory.
• Most of the time, threads wait until some I / O operations are finished.
• Context-switching and scheduling greatly increase with a large number of threads.

Here, we learned the most important messaging and integration patterns about Node.js and the role played in the design of distributed systems.

Why companies are leaning towards Node.js development?

• Node.js is a popular part of mean MEAN (MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS , and Node.js) stack and mern.
• Many popular frameworks are written for Node.js like Express, Sails, and meteor, etc. due to it’s flexibility and scalability.
• Node.js supports microservices in an incredible way. It is a lightweight platform for microservices architecture. Node.js development enables to break application logic into smaller modules instead of creating a single, large monolithic core, thereby enabling better flexibility and scalability. As a result, it is easier to add more microservices on top of existing applications, so that additional features can be integrated with native application.With each micro service communicating directly with the database via streams, such architecture allows better performance in relatively less time. A match made in heaven is supported by two frameworks, widely used for micro-service architecture. The Express Framework lists IBM and Uber among its users, while the restore is used by NPM and Netflix.

• The frontend and backend are easier to keep in sync because of a single language used on both sides of the application.
• From a developer’s standpoint, it is very easy to either share or reuse the code via Node.js module, which basically is independent junk of code. Developers can either use the pre build module or reuse their own code with building an application with Node.js
• Application built with Node.js are highly scalable and lightweight.