Why use Node.js?

Learn, adapt and improve with Node.js technology

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform technology designed to build faster and scalable real-time applications. Node.js is built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. Without any doubt, the specialty-rich Node.js is a real blessing for developers to develop high-intensity, lightweight, speedy solutions for which are supposed to rule the market world. With all of its benefits, Node.js now has rising popularity of 4 million+ users across the world. Many high-profile companies like Netflix, Wal-Mart, LinkedIn, eBay, and even NASA make use of this stellar technology - Node.js. Playing a critical role in the technology-driven industry, Node.js is now popular in developing server-side and networking applications. Now let's get down to the features of Node.js that makes companies depend on the unique benefits.

Stunning Features of Node.js

Open source: Node.js has an open-source runtime environment which provides the facility of caching single modules. The open source community of Node.js produces robust modules that add to the additional capabilities of Node.js applications. Lightning speed: As Node.js is built on Google Chrome's V8 JavaScript Engine, the rich Node.js library makes it fast in the execution of codes. The peculiarity of Node.js is that it is capable of increasing the speed of any framework. Asynchronous and Event Driven: Node.js is purely based on event-driven architecture. It essentially means that every single operation and call in a script is executed in an asynchronous manner. Node.js adopts asynchronous programming model with the help of Node.js event-loop, developers can create a swift web-based dashboard that checks for the statuses of services in an asynchronous manner. Single Threaded: Node.js follows a single threaded model and uses only a single CPU core. The benefit of using "Single Threaded Event Looping" approach is that you can handle thousands of requests per second. The fact is that the main event loop is single-threaded and almost all I/O works run on separate threads.

Highly Scalable: The non-blocking or asynchronous nature of Node.js makes node applications highly scalable. The single threaded asynchronous architecture uses events, queues and causality features for developing highly scalable, data-intensive, real-time applications. Lightweight: Lightweight and speedy apps rule the internet. The non-blocking I/O and event-driven model of Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient for building data-intensive, swift and real-time applications that are designed to run across distributed devices. Effective single codebase: Undoubtedly, Node.js is a game-changing technology. Developers are free to write both JavaScript server-side and client-side coding. This makes it easy to send and automatically synchronize the data between these two points. The main advantage of this feature is that it helps developers save time.

Learn More about the Basics of Node.Js

Being an interface that helps in building real-time network applications enabling event-driven programming through super-fast JavaScript interpreter, Node.js is now the first choice even for all your scalable architecture needs. From managing numerous clients on a single platform by providing solutions to critical business problems to streamlining I/O operations and resolving failures are some of the development operations that can be achieved using this revolutionary platform.

Now let's talk more about the approaches incorporated by Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js, with an aim to create swift, real-time websites with push capability.

Non-Blocking I/O Model

Node.js has a new way of serving to the web or any other type of server requests known as Non-blocking IO Operation. To put it simply, Node.js is meant to empower real-time web applications by simply adopting push technology with the two-way channel. This platform is also lightweight and single-threaded which is highly apt for data-dense real-time web applications distributed over multiple devices.

The Node Package Manager

The Node Package Manager is the default Package Manager and gets automatically installed with Node.js. The Node Package Manager was developed by Isaac Z. Schlueter and its modules are somewhat similar to that of Ruby Gems. Released on January 12, 2010, The Node Package Manager has a set of public and reusable components (an NPM ecosystem is an open source system) and the full list of packaged modules are available on the npm website. It can also be accessed using the npm CLI tool. This tool also gets automatically installed with Node.js.

The Benefits of Node.js

Following are some of the key advantages of incorporating Node.js in your stack.

Easy to Learn

Node.js is an open source platform written in JavaScript. The age of web development has been completely revolutionized by JavaScript. And undoubtedly, it is the most popular and rising language in the global tech world. Moreover, Node.js gives developers complete freedom to write JavaScript for both the server and the client. This approach makes it convenient to transport data both between the server and the client.

Single Programming Language

Node.js offers complete flexibility for the developers to write the server-side applications in the JavaScript. This means that there is no need to use any other server-side programming languages except JavaScript for coding both the front-end as well as the back-end web applications. The deployment of such dynamic web applications tends to be easy as most of the existing web browsers support JavaScript.

High Performance

Node.js technology has all the features that offer high performance and scalability. Node.js interprets the JavaScript code using Google's V8 JavaScript engine. And so the engine compiles the entire JavaScript directly into the machine code, making it faster to implement the code. Another significant feature of node.js is that it incorporates a single-threaded asynchronous model which is meant to enhance the performance and scalability of Node.js web applications.

Support from the Active Community

A widely growing, active and open source community of Node.js developers keeps continuously contributing to the further development of such an innovative platform. JavaScript programmers are always ready to deliver outstanding modules that always keep Node.js ahead of the competition.