A web application is an application program that is stored on a remote server. It can be accessed over the internet through a client program, which in most instances is a browser. Since web servers and internet service grew in scale and reliability over the years, enterprises leveraged its power in order to facilitate people working from multiple locations. As they grew in popularity, many frameworks were introduced in order to streamline the development of the web applications, and make them more secure. A few of the popular web development frameworks include Bootstrap, Angular JS, Ruby on Rails; of course there are many other noteworthy platforms as well. All these platforms are client-side; there was a dearth of platforms that worked on the server side. This is where Node.js stepped in.
Node.js was created by Ryan Dahl in 2009. While the initial version ran only on Linux, the popularity of the app made Microsoft come up with support for it. Based on the now ubiquitous JavaScript, Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform runtime environment used for development of server-side web applications. Node.js applications are based on an event-driven architecture and can be run on a wide variety of operating systems. An asynchronous event driven JavaScript runtime, Node.js is a non-blocking Input / Output API that is designed to build scalable network applications. Node.js optimizes an application’s throughput and scalability for real-time web applications.
One of the many reasons why Node.js is so popular is that it is stateful. What separates a stateful app from a stateless app is that it relies on database, an external cache system, etc. to store a user’s session information. Stateless apps, on the other hand, keep its information between multiple requests in memory on the servers, and a lot of work needs to be to maintain the session information between requests for a user. Since Node.js allows the state to be maintained, and the either the client or server can start the Communication, it is easy to exchange data.
In order to understand how Node.js works, it is beneficial to understand a few key features of JavaScript that make it well suited for server-side development. JavaScript is a simple language, but it is also extremely flexible. This flexibility is the reason why it has stood the test of time. First-class functions and closures make it an ideal language for web applications.
The Node.js framework is available for a variety of operating systems right from Windows to Ubuntu and OS X. Once the Node.js framework is installed you can start building your first Node.js applications. Node.js also has the ability to embedded external functionality or extended functionality by making use of custom modules.
Node.js relies on various dependencies under the hood for providing various features:
V8: V8 is Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, written in C++
libuv: libuv is a C library originally written for Node.js to abstract non-blocking I/O operations
llhttp: is the HTTP parser for Node.js.
c-ares: C library for asynchronous DNS requests
OpenSSL: a robust, general purpose cryptography library for implementation of the Secure Sockets and for secure communication
Features
- Handles multi-user applications; with each new request, heap allocation is generated and each request handled sequentially
- Tightly coupled to google V8 engine, making it incredibly fast. It can support almost 1 million concurrent connections
- Node.js provides a module called “Event” that facilitates event-driven programming
- Facilitates quick deployment and micro service development
- Native JSON handling, easy RESTful services and speedy native bindings in C
- it is highly scalable, with an active open source community
- Node.js is an open-source, under MIT license, which basically means it is free to use
Node.js is the top contender for using in streaming or event-based real-time applications like chat application and fast and high performance game servers. Because they are asynchronous and event driven, Node.js APIs are good for collaborative environment (for example document management), REST and JSON APIs and for computing and orchestration tasks divided using worker processes.
Node.js is quite popular as advertisement servers and streaming servers as well. Of courses, there are scenarios where Node.js should not be used. That includes instances where there are long processing times which is required by the application. Node is structured to be single threaded. If any application is required to carry out some long running calculations in the background, it requires more CPU time. It is also not recommended for applications needing to process large amounts of data in parallel.
Installing Node.js
Node Package Manager (NPM) stands for Node Package Manager, which is an application and repository for developing and sharing JavaScript code. It is a command line tool that installs, updates or uninstalls Node.js packages in your application. It is also an online repository for open-source Node.js packages. The node community around the world creates useful modules and publishes them as packages in this repository. NPM is included with Node.js installation. Since Node.js is a framework, it doesn’t work as a normal application. Instead, it interprets commands that you write.
There are many frameworks to develop apps in Node.js, especially for tasks that are difficult to perform. A few of the most popular ones include Express.js, Koa.js, Nest.js and Socket.io
Jobs in Node.js