What are the capabilities and advantages of Node.js and which applications definitely win with this technology?
What is Node.js?
Node.js technology is ten years old. It is an open source JavaScript runtime environment which allows building JavaScript programs for the server-side. It uses V8 JavaScript Engine, an important integration that once increased Node popularity and upgraded it to the next level very quickly. V8 engine which powers Google Chrome executes JavaScript code while browsing with Google. While many think of Node.js to be only a backend framework, this technology can also be used to build front-end.
The most exciting single piece of software in the current JavaScript universe
Ryan Dahl, software engineer and inventor of Node.js
Node.js was created by Ryan Dahl and released in 2009 quickly earning popularity among large companies and enterprises.
Key benefits of using Node.js
1. Node.js is excellent for calling other services. For the majority of apps it is critical to make communication with the database and platform API seamless.
2. Node.js increases performance and handles a lot of requests. For the client side it is very useful, practical and fast because it demands users to make fewer clicks and have everything loaded at once.
3. Node.js overcomes large data processing challenges.
4. Node.js enables development teams to use JavaScript both for the server and the browser.
5. Node.js now includes 40% fewer files and 30% less code which simplifies the whole process of application development.
6. Smooth, fast UI and customization is possible with Node.js. And Netflix here is a true winner with one of the most successful UI ever.
7. Node.js has a large and active community of engineers who constantly contribute and improve the technology.
8. Extensive NPM offers a lot of ready-made solutions engineers can use.
9. Node.js is easy to learn.
10. It’s great for startups as they can enjoy faster development and faster entering the market with their products.
Node.js famous apps
To check what Node.js is capable of let’s have a look at top famous apps written with Node.js.
- Netflix. The Netflix team wanted to decrease startup time and find a solution to handle the enormously increasing number of users. Node.js allowed them to go from 40 minutes to 1 minute in startup times. In June 2018 the film streaming website successfully reached 130 million users. In 2019 this number was already 167 million.
- Trello popularity was growing quickly, so the team needed fast, event-based and non-blocking technology and that’s why they started to use Node.js. Trello now handles over 50 million users.
Node is great, and getting better all of the time as its active developer community churns out new and useful libraries
- The LinkedIn backend is built entirely with Node.js. The LinkedIn team striving for better performance and scalability and using Node.js to reach this was totally justified. They transformed synchronous Ruby on Rails mobile apps to asynchronous evented Node apps. LinkedIn’s also using Kafka server which doubled its traffic capacity and now the LinkedIN handles 660 million uf users.
- Uber app has reached 6 continents and 68 countries. Uber uses Node.js to handle a lot of requests quickly and without bugs, make error analysis convenient and deploy code quickly. This is how Uber manages to build a massive system with enhanced data processing capabilities.
Node.js is particularly well-suited to writing systems that have all their state in memory, as they do not have to externalize the concerns of a distributed system, thus resulting in that the systems can be more available, and they can respond more quickly to requests by eliminating the reading/writing and the serialization of state into a database
Kris Kowal, Software Engineer at Uber
Is Node.js difficult to learn?
Engineers who know JavaScript and Object Oriented Programming basics will not encounter any difficulties in learning Node.js. More than that Node.js allows developing both for client and server sides which makes life so easier as you do not have to switch between frontend and backend. You have it all together built with Node.js. It also means application in Node.js requires less coding, so less time for development.
NPM – not to invent the wheel yourself
Node.js Package Manager is used by almost 11 million engineers. It is the largest and the fastest growing package manager in the world. As a large package store it helps to build with MEAN and MERN stacks. Developers can prebuild modules or reuse their own.
There are also many frameworks built for Node.js such as:
Why is Node.js great for web development?
Node.js is the most suitable real-time web applications, streaming websites, messaging and chatting apps, virtual emulators, games and collaboration apps with several users.
What is Node.js community?
Businesses hiring Node.js engineers can be sure in finding great candidates because the talent pool is vast. Node.js community is huge and can boast of active contributors. On GitHub Node.js gets 72.5k stars. The JavaScript community makes constant improvements to the V8 Engine and Google invests a lot into its development.
Scalability – Node.js golden benefit
It’s a non-blocking input-output model which facilitates several requests at a time. Consequently, there are less CPU tasks which take more time to be processed. If you plan to grow across cities of countries with your startup, this technology is ideal for you. Want thousands of users to watch video streams via your website? Looking for the expertise to create social media solutions with an increasing number of users who will load mass of media? Hire Node.js software developers. It’s really the most justified decision for apps which demand reliable scalability.
Why do software engineers love Node.js?
Stack overflow surveyed 65 000 developers in 2020 and found out that Node.js is the most loved framework for 66.8% of respondents.
It is one of the successful, widely-used, and popular open-source projects on this earth. Thousands of users including NASA, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal, Walmart, Uber, LinkedIn, Netflix, and so on.
Great performance, speed and easiness make Node a favourite. Great ecosystem, libraries and modules, asynchronous development, light learning curve are additional pluses to node.js feedback. RisingStack showed results of a survey in which developers were asked what they actually build with the given technology. The first place takes API development, then goes backend and servers, and third place is writing web applications. Node.js is used less for frontend development, microservices and websites.
Answers for what engineers use Node.js are diverse which means the technology itself has a wide sphere of application.
When it comes to choices of engineers’ for frontend technology if they have to pick one, React is a leader, then come Angular 2 and Vue.js. If to speak about databases MongoDB remains the most popular among Node.js developers.
Start your project with the right technology
Efficiency, high speed and scalability are top 3 Node.js benefits. It is the technology which brings a lot of advantages for product owners who want to scale up with their apps and grow a million audience of users. If you are thinking about using Node.js and hiring Node.js engineers for your project, among the node js advantages that will convince you are:
- Verified fast performance and scalability
- Efficient and reusable code
- Opportunity to build front and backend
- Smooth data streaming
- Excellent server side development
- Extensive NPM repository with many libraries
- Handling increasing number of concurrent connections
