Node.js has launched a decade ago and is certainly not a new technology. What it has become, however, is an extremely popular piece of tech among Fortune 500 companies due to its fast execution, a single language, easy scalability, mobile-friendliness, and top-notch performance. Software developers with Node.js skills add tremendous value to their CVs as Node will continue to be in high demand in the coming years.
Whether you’re building interactive websites or real-time apps, performance-wise, you cannot go wrong with Node.js, especially if speed is the name of your game. In this post, we’ll establish a good understanding of the popularity of Node.js and why you should consider it for future projects. But first, let’s get over with the basics.
What is Node.js?
It is a free, open-source, asynchronous JavaScript runtime environment (built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine) that runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc., using an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model. It is lightweight, scalable, and ideal for applications that require a continuous connection from the browser to the server.
What Is It Used For?
Best use cases are:- chat server, real-time apps, online gaming, video conferencing, news and instant messaging apps, e-commerce, stock-trading apps. It’s mainly used for web applications but is also being used for enterprise applications more widely now. Companies like Groupon, PayPal, eBay, Uber, Trello, IBM, Walmart, GoDaddy, Twitter, Yahoo, Netflix, and hundreds of other successful brands use Node.js. Most notably, NASA uses Node.js to keep astronauts safe in space by reducing access timelines, procedural steps, and having a single database.
Benefits of Node.js
Fast and easy
The application development game these days requires lightning-fast speed owing to shorter time-to-market cycles. This is where Node.js wins. Testing, deployment, and delivery spans can be hugely minimized with Node.js as it’s single-thread based with support for thousands of concurrent connections within one event loop. Less code is required and the code is reusable and shareable across applications. Besides, if you already know the JavaScript framework, Node is easy to learn and is a great way to start in order to get into full-stack development.
Top performance
Due to being fast, lightweight, and simple, Node.js has been known to enhance the performance and output for famous brands. It can handle heavy-duty customer requests and manage push notifications, process huge amount of data speedily and accurately, it can increase traffic while decreasing servers, reduce the size of software teams as it’s easy to write, debug and engineer API, it reduces the workload significantly due to single programming language and reusable code, it has the best tools for real-time apps, ergo high customer satisfaction.
Furthermore, with an average person owning a minimum of 2 to 3 IoT devices, the world is going to be even more connected. Node.js easily supports and integrates MQTT and WebSocket while handling heavy data streaming efficiently.
Increases productivity
Node.js enables software developers to produce more results in a less amount of time since front-end and back-end can be merged through this tech without the need to use any other server-side programming language. Node tools for developers work across platforms, the learning curve is low and there’s zero duplication, thus costs are also decreased. Developers have found that their productivity had increased by 68%, and developer satisfaction had improved by 62% while businesses found that development costs had reduced by 60%, according to the Node.js Survey.
Excellent package manager
Easy to configure and ideal for a large variety of use cases, npm is the highest rated (default) package manager for Node and a marketplace for JavaScript tools. It is considered to be the largest software registry in the world. Some highly popular tools (packages) used by developers are Express.js, Mocha.js, Chai, Grunt, Passport.js, Webpack, Socket.io, Meteor, PM2. The one-millionth package was registered on the npm registry in 2019.
Works well with microservices architecture
As opposed to an inflexible and monolithic approach to development, the microservices architecture uses a smaller, independent, modular services approach that is more lightweight with well-defined and highly specific roles. Node.js is ideal for this architecture as it allows developers to build individual components that fit the bigger construct flawlessly. Most apps (90% by 2022 according to an IDC report) are going to be microservices-based. Node.js complements it because it supports modular development, speedier execution real-time collaboration, data-intensive apps, being easy to update and deploy.
It’s scalable
Node.js is designed to be scalable at the very core. The one big reason why Node.js is popular among Fortune 500 companies, as well as developers, is its scalability to run real-time apps for a multitude of device types. It may not be ideal for CPU-intensive tasks, but has superior load balancing and can process large amounts of requests without waiting for a function to return results (less overhead to manage requests). It can achieve scalability of over 1 million concurrent conversations on a single thread. Its perfect partner is Kubernetes, for automating and scaling deployment.
Maximum community support
It’s only highly progressive that today’s democratized software development thrives on open source communities for self-correction, reuse, and mitigation of vulnerabilities. Node.js has a global developer community as well as tremendous corporate backing. It’s well-tested with already created tools that abound in an active community, so you’ll find a solution to pretty much any development problems or bottlenecks.
Convinced yet? We certainly hope so. For beginners, Node.js can be a challenge if you’re not well-versed in the event loop and not great at functional programming techniques. Debugging and excessive callbacks are only some cons developers complain about. The good thing is that there is plenty of community help, tutorials, and guides available online for any problems and the pros surely outweigh the cons.
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