There is more than one factor that should be considered when selecting the technology to use when building your app or website.
In fact, if you are planning to create apps involving a lot of data read and write operations and depending on the processing speed (media apps, booking systems, e-commerce platform development, fintech software, and others), then Node.js will perform perfectly there.
Needless to say, the choice depends on the nature of your enterprise applications and we cannot say that enterprise applications are never built with Node.js.
Node.js has been in news due to its multifarious features and the support it provides.
It ranks in the top most-in-demand developer skills and is gaining traction faster than any other technology.
Not only being popular for building microservices, Internet of Things and real-time applications, Node.js thrives to provide greater experience with more than a billion downloads.
Node.js made easy for developers.
Starting with the definition- Node.js is substantially efficient, lightweight and streamlined JavaScript runtime environment that is built on JavaScript engine and is one of the most suitable languages if you want to build cross-platform applications.
It is a free and open source and utilized for creating server-side JS applications and provides scope for mobile application development and enables Node developers to write the real-time applications as it provides a faster way to write scripts which are scalable and light. Node.js applications can runs within the Node.js runtime on Linux and Microsoft Windows as these applications are written in JavaScript.
Just because Nodejs has an event-driven architecture capable of asynchronous I/O, when talking about server-side, NodeJS is quite popular as it is an event-driven non-blocking runtime environment for JavaScript.
Node.js can appropriately handle asynchronous JavaScript code to handle many activities.
Node.js contains a large number of open-source libraries in the package within its package ecosystem (NPM)- as it is written in c/c++, it can be used to build both server as well as desktop applications.
Moreover, when it comes to concurrency and throughput, JavaScript execution in Node.js is single-threaded allowing the event loop to continue running as non-JavaScript operations, like I/O, are occurring.
When it comes to building scalable and fast server-side application, Node JS is a clear-cut winner because Node JS gives JavaScript ability to connect with other external libraries written in various other languages and interact with I/O (input/output) devices through its APIs.
Infact, Node.js also supports sub/pub programming, event-driven, concurrency-oriented, object-oriented and functional paradigms. For example, in order to get started incorporating Event-Driven Programming in our project right away, Node.js provides us with a useful module called EventEmitter.
My Takeaway from Experience: With Node.js, it’s possible to write both backend and frontend solely in JavaScript, using full-stack solutions such as MEAN or MEVN. MEAN stack is the new buzzword around the corporate nowadays.
Node.js helps in building web products with much ease and better time to market; in addition Node.js is the future.
So, my suggestion to people who are planning to become a Node.js developer is that you learn both Node.js and JavaScript, which unifies the data format (JSON), and language, allowing the developer to optimally reuse developer resources.
The developers need to be a JavaScript developer to use Node.js because they have the same language on the frontend and the backend.
Let’s discuss why Node.js is the best framework for developers:
Node.js is promising and has tons of potential. Whether it’s an enterprise or a rookie project, Node.js solves most of the problem which revolves around web and web development.
In fact, for the backend for websites and services, more and more organizations are shifting to Node.js.
Various developers have also started using it at the backend, running under Node.js environment as the demand for single-page web apps is increasing rapidly.
However, there are tons of concepts and practices in Node.js that need to be mastered, such as continuation passing style model (which is nothing but callback and promises) and asynchronous programming model paradigm.
We have picked some of the most important advantages of Node.js for developers here:
- For enterprise apps, Node provide a perfect and popular solution i.e. microservices.
- Code executes faster than in any other language.
- Node.js allows developers to code both the frontend and the backend using JavaScript.
- Node.s is helping in boosting developer’s productivity through offering the ever-growing NPM (Node Package Manager) that consists of multiple tools and modules to use.
- It fills the gap between frontend and backend developers (more on this later) increasing the efficiency of the development process.
- It makes coding in JavaScript for both the server and client side possible.
- It makes building real-time apps (e.g. gaming or chat).
- Node.js is quite a natural fit for exposing the data from object DBs (e.g. MongoDB).
- Cluster module in Node.js enables load balancing over multiple CPU cores.
- To easily monitor, optimize and deploy Node applications, offers robust tools, such as the PM2 process manager.
- And alike advantages are mentioned below in detail to read further…
#1 Node.js Create Classic Server-Side Web Applications
A working website has three core parts, Database, Back-end (Server), and Front-end. NodeJS is used widely for developing server-side, fast networking and scalable applications.
Moreover, it also helps developers in developing apps that demand real-time drawing and editing.
With Express.js, Node.js can be used to create classic web applications on the server-side. To tell you the not so most typical use-case, Node.js would be carrying around rendered HTML while possibly considering this request-response paradigm.
Well, while considering this approach, many have undergone arguments to be made against and for this approach. Although, here are some conditions to be adhere to such as crawlers receive a fully-rendered HTML response run on top of Node.js, which is far more SEO-friendly than, for imagine, a websockets app or a Single Page Application; and you can build a application, which doesn’t have any CPU intensive computation, in Javascript top-to-bottom.
#2 Node.js Allows Cross-Platform Development
Since many years till today, Node.js has been allowing developers to improve their coding efficiency, performance, and overall happiness in so many highly innovative enterprises.
If you are an aspiring developer then you need to know that you don’t need a Windows machine for Windows apps or a Mac to build, debug and write a macOS app.
Why?..
Because, the majority of Node.Js Developer tools are cross-platform.
Moreover, Node.js enables them to debug and profile backend and desktop apps as efficiently as client-side apps because like Google Chrome Developer Tools, it also provides the access to the same great tooling as Front-end developers.
More to the information, not having expert knowledge of C#, Objective-C, or any other language required for building native apps, developers working on your Web app can deliver a desktop app as well.
That means, you can use some of the code from your Web app in its desktop versions for Linux, Windows and macOS as platforms like NW.js or Electron let you build cross-platform desktop apps with Node.js.
#3 Big Brands are Thriving with Node.js
Linkedin, Uber, Netflix, The New York Times, PayPal, Microsoft and many such established big companies are great examples to put forth when it come to the adoption of Node.js.
Uber— It gets better own its own as the technology optimizes itself.
Paypal— The Node.js app was built in 40% less files, 33% fewer codes, and recorded a decline in their response time by 35%.
Netflix— The start-up time for Netflix app was recorded to be reduced by 70%.
LinkedIn — With Node.js, they used fewer resources from 30 servers it was reduced to 3 for their mobile application that’s 20 times faster.
Today, so many startups are available that tend to exploit the potential of nearly every recent etechnology accessible in the market, hence gaining the momentum.
#4 Node.js – Freedom For Building Diverse Applications
Node.js helps the developers to create an application from scratch as it is entirely un-opinionated.
The NPM or Node Package Manager is also such example that helps in avoiding new layers of complexity that often come with that particular territory and allows the developers to not write common features from scratch to create products in JavaScript that were formerly reserved for general-purpose programming languages, such as Java or Python.
Nowadays build cross-platform desktop apps by pairing Node.js with Electron or you can even control robots with Node.js.
#5 Node.js Offers Scalability and Performance
Node.js can handle hundreds of thousands or even a million concurrent connections efficiently.
Because, with delegating tasks such as database operations as soon as possible, it operates on a single thread and event-driven architecture, making use of the callbacks and event loop for I/O operations.
It gets frequent updations including support for modern JavaScript features, security patches and optimizations. Node.js is built for multiple operating systems super fast.
