Node.js

What Is Node.js and Why You Should Use It

JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. It powers millions of websites today, and it has attracted droves of developers and designers to build features for the web. If you’re new to programming, JavaScript is easily one of the best programming languages to get under your belt.

For its first 20 years, JavaScript was used mainly for client-side scripting. Since JavaScript could be used only within the <script> tag, developers had to work in multiple languages and frameworks between the front-end and back-end components. Later came Node.js, which is a run-time environment that includes everything required to execute a program written in JavaScript.

Features Of Node.js

Node.js has grown quickly in the last few years. This is thanks to the vast list of features it provides:

1. Easy—Node.js is quite easy to start with. It’s a go-to choice for web development beginners. With a lot of tutorials and a large community—getting started is very easy.
2. Scalable—It provides vast scalability for applications. Node.js, being single-threaded, is capable of handling a huge number of simultaneous connections with high throughput.
3. Speed—Non-blocking thread execution makes Node.js even faster and more efficient.
4. Packages—A vast set of open-source Node.js packages is available that can simplify your work. There are more than one million packages in the NPM ecosystem today.
5. Strong backend—Node.js is written in C and C++, which makes it speedy and adds features like networking support.
6. Multi-platform—Cross-platform support allows you to create SaaS websites, desktop apps, and even mobile apps, all using Node.js.
7. Maintainable—Node.js is an easy choice for developers since both the frontend and backend can be managed with JavaScript as a single language.

Market Size

There has been immense growth in websites in the last 2 decades, and as expected, Node.js is growing fast as well. The popular runtime already crossed the 1-billion download threshold back in 2018, and according to W3Techs, Node.js is used by 1.2% of all websites everywhere. That’s over 20 million total sites across the internet.

Not surprisingly, it’s a popular selection with millions of companies, too. Here are a few popular ones that use Node.js today:

• Twitter
• Spotify
• eBay
• Reddit
• LinkedIn
• Godaddy

Node.js is used for a wide variety of applications. Let’s explore some popular use cases where Node.js is a good choice:

1. Real-time chats—Due to its single-threaded asynchronous nature, Node.js is well-suited to processing real-time communication. It can easily scale and is often used in building chatbots. Node.js also makes it simple to build additional chat features like multi-person chat and push notifications.
2. Internet of Things—IoT applications usually comprise multiple sensors, as they frequently send small chunks of data that can pile into a large number of requests. Node.js is a good choice since it’s able to handle these concurrent requests quickly.
3. Data streaming—Companies like Netflix use Node.js for streaming purposes. This is mainly due to Node.js being lightweight and fast, besides which Node.js provides a native streaming API. These streams allow users to pipe requests to each other, resulting in data being streamed directly to its final destination.
4. Complex single-page applications (SPAs)—In SPAs, the whole application is loaded in a single page. This usually means there are a couple of requests made in the background for specific components. Node.js’s event loop comes to the rescue here, as it processes requests in a non-blocking fashion.
5. REST API-based applications—JavaScript is used both in the frontend and backend of sites. Thus, a server can easily communicate with the frontend via REST APIs using Node.js. Node.js also provides packages like Express.js and Koa that make it even easier to build web applications.

Is Node.js A Programming Language?

In a word: no.

Node.js is not a programming language. Rather, it’s a runtime environment that’s used to run JavaScript outside the browser.

Neither is Node.js a framework (a platform for developing software applications). The Node.js runtime is built on top of a programming language—in this case, JavaScript—and helps in running frameworks itself.

To sum up, Node.js is neither a programming language nor a framework; it’s an environment for them.

Is Node.js Frontend Or Backend?

A common misconception among developers is that Node.js is a backend framework and is only used for building servers. This isn’t true: Node.js can be used both on the frontend and the backend.

One of the reasons Node.js frameworks are a popular choice for developers building a flexible and scalable backend is its event-driven, non-blocking nature. However, frontend developers will see these benefits of Node.js in their own work just as clearly.

Let’s take a look at why Node.js works for both backend and frontend:

1. Reusability – JavaScript is a common language that’s used to write both backend and frontend with the help of frameworks like Express.js and Meteor.js. Some popular stacks like MERN use Express.js as a backend (a Node.js framework). Multiple components can be reused between frontend and backend as well.
2. Productivity and developer efficiency – Thanks to a reduction in context-switching between multiple languages, a great deal of developer time can be saved. Using JavaScript for both backend and frontend results in increased efficiency, as many tools are common for both.
3. Huge community – A thriving online community factors into the speed of a successful development cycle. When you get stuck on a problem, there’s a good chance that someone’s already solved it and shared the solution on Stack Overflow. Node.js makes great use of this community, which is active and engaged when it comes to the popular runtime and its packages.