Needless to say Node.js is truly the most popular web application out there, so much so that it outdoes other web applications by replacing websockets with revolutionary push technology. So what is so wonderful about them? Well, the answer is quite simple if you just dig a little. There is this cutting-edge web application with two-way, real-time connections allowing both the server and client build communication and it allows exchanging valuable data. So this simply is distinguished to the conventional web response paradigm where the communication is initiated by the client.
Node.js server technology is useful in creating and running wide-ranging web applications with it being similar to what Ruby On Rails, Spring Framework and ASP.NET does. Leveraging JavaScript as the primary language, this is actually a lightweight built-in web server with myriad Plugins managed via the Node Package Manager (NPM), enabling to custom-build your applications in order to meet your requirements. This is a good web technology with amazing features and thus it is prominent among developers to build wide-ranging web applications.
So here we present the reasons why Node.js is apt for you:
1. It is JavaScript Everywhere
Well, the most popular reason is that Node.js is prominent as it uses JavaScript as the main language to build web applications. It is just the choice that works best in web application development in the browser. Along with it, you have a new and robust framework popular that easily entices developers. Node.js has helped in revolutionizing JavaScript on the server. Known to most web developers, this language is reining at the moment and will continue to do so in days to come. Now as JavaScript has been used by the most developers thus the transition from another web technology to Node.js is way easier and it’s the best choice among web developers.
2. It’s lightning Fast
This JavaScript runtime is powered by V8, developed by Google and can be easily used in Chrome. It’s able to compile and execute JavaScript at a great speed as it complies JavaScript into a native machine code. Besides Node.js has an amazing event loop that’s a single thread and performs all I/O operations in an asynchronously. In case of Node.js, as an application performs I/O operations, it sends asynchronous tasks and callback action to the event loop and then continuously performs the rest of the program. As sync operation completes, the event loop quickly makes a return to the task in order to perform callback. Now this consumes a lot of memory and is quite tough to execute.
This way reading/writing to file system, network connections and to the database happen very quickly to Node as it enables developers build fast and scalable network applications capable of handling bulk amount of concurrent connections that have high throughput.
3. It is Lightweight
As it comes to Node.js, here the basic event-driven architecture is used which signifies that everything is executed on it, comprising of every operation and call and this is a series of asynchronous callback. This way Node is allowed to run on a single thread unlike other web technologies that allows a new thread to initiate for each client request. This way it turns out to be light-weight, forming the foundation of Node’s non-blocking I/O feature.
4. A Single Language for All Layers
Most importantly, it allows language re-use. In case of other web technologies such as Spring or ASP.NET, there is a requirement for developers to have knowledge in another language as that helps in writing code on the server-side, whether it’s VB.NET, Java or C#. This way all functions mainly requires two languages – one on the client side and another on server side. Besides, Node uses just JavaScript for the client and server side. This way, web developers are required to make interaction just in a single language across all layers. At the same time this can be re-used time and again for future communications.
5. High Performance
PayPal requires Node.js and it is known that the number of requests have been doubled per-second while the response-time has reduced by 35%. Meanwhile, WalMart, which is a retail giant has an amazing experience with Node.js in 2013, where they had put all the mobile-based traffic via Node.js on Black Friday. This turned to be the busiest shopping time of the year. The wonderful thing was that on Black Friday, Wal Mart servers didn’t go over just 1% CPU utilization and they deployed with 200,000,000 users online. LinkedIn is the global networking sites that moved from Ruby to Node handling the mobile traffic well as reducing the number of servers to 30 to 3, i.e. around 90% reduction. Here the new system was around 20 times faster with all these figures indicating performance capability of Node.js.
6. It can be Hosted Anywhere
Well, almost anywhere. If we go by the extraordinary growth in Node.js usage in recent years, you come around several of cloud-based hosting providers and web servers supporting web applications built on Node. This comprise of Google, Amazon AWS, Heroku, Microsoft IIS, Microsoft Azure and many others.
Conclusion
Quite clear by now that Node.js is popular as of now as it present amazing possibilities that can be leveraged by the developers in order to build highly robust and scalable web applications. So do give it a try before it bites the dust.
