One of the most widely used programming languages is JavaScript. According to Statista, JavaScript is the most popular programming language used by software developers globally in the last 12 months, according to 69% of those surveyed.
What is Node.js?
Ryan Dahl was the first to launch Node.js in 2009. Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment, with a focus on server-side and networking applications.
As Node.js is open source, it is free to use and is continually being updated and improved by a global community of developers.
Node.js allows developers to create fast, scalable network applications with simple code. It’s compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Unix, and other operating systems.
Node.js is built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. It allows JavaScript users to execute server-side scripting and run programs to dynamically generate web content. The Node.js environment is more of a run-time environment.
A runtime environment (also known as an RTE) is a collection of Web APIs that a developer can use to create code, as well as a JavaScript engine that parses that code. This makes it lightweight, adaptable, and simple to deploy, all these features will aid in the optimization and speed up your application project. It employs a non-blocking I/O approach and has an event-driven model. It’s perfect for real-time and data-intensive applications.
Why Node.js is the Most Popular Server-Side JavaScript?
- It is easy to learn
- Highly scalable
- Node.js is light and fast
- Full-stack JavaScript
- Cross-platform development
- Active community
Learn more — bit.ly/3My77uR
What is Node.js used for?
Node.js is a platform that is built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime to easily build fast and scalable network applications. Node.js is primarily used as an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime due to its single-threaded nature. It is used for traditional websites and back-end API services but was built with a real-time, push-based architecture in mind.
Node.js is used in many different applications. Let’s look at some common scenarios where Node.js is a good fit:
Real-time Chats: Node.js is well-suited to handling real-time communication due to its single-threaded asynchronous nature. It’s scalable and frequently used in chatbot development. Additional chat features like multi-person chat and push alerts are similarly simple to implement with Node.js.
Internet of Things: IoT applications commonly use numerous sensors, as they often send small pieces of data that can accumulate into a huge number of requests. Node.js is a fantastic choice because it can handle these concurrent requests rapidly.
Data Streaming: Netflix and other streaming services use Node.js. This is mainly because Node.js is lightweight and fast and also provides a native streaming API. Users can pipe requests to each other over these streams, resulting in data being streamed directly to its final destination.
Complex Single Page Apps: The entire app is loaded on a single page in SPAs. This usually signifies that a few requests for certain components are being made in the background. The event loop in Node.js comes to the rescue here, processing requests in a non-blocking manner.
REST API Based Applications: Both the frontend and backend of websites use JavaScript. Using Node.js, a server may simply communicate with the frontend using REST APIs. Node.js also includes packages like Express.js and Koa that make developing web apps much easier.
In a nutshell, Node.js is a popular JavaScript runtime environment for building high-scale apps that supports multiple concurrent requests. Its non-blocking single-threaded I/O makes it ideal for both real-time and data streaming applications.
Since its introduction in 2009, Node.js has risen to become one of the most demanded technologies, indicating that it is extremely powerful. Node.js has become a solution to many difficulties by providing security, scalability, and performance.
Read the post in detail here — bit.ly/3My77uR