Knowledge base

Why you should choose Node.js for your project development?

Mike Butusov
Head of Marketing at TechMagic. Passionate about startups, digital ecosystem, cloud technologies, and innovations.
Why you should choose Node.js for your project development?

A lot of people know JavaScript programming language, even those who do not claim being programmers.

It is doubtless that this is the most popular programming language. With Node.js, an open source runtime system based on JavaScript invented in 2009 by Ryan Dahl, it has extended to the server side. Node.js has become wildly popular with coders. It is used everywhere to create APIs and build a new matrix of interoperability across the Internet.

Why should a development team choose Node.js? It is a single language on client and server. It is exceptionally easy to install and get running. NPM is pretty cool and web sockets module is neat. Let’s dive deeper into advantages of Node.js in this article.

What is Node.js?

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform runtime environment for developing server-side Web applications. Although Node.js is not a JavaScript framework, many of its basic modules are written in JavaScript, and developers can write new modules in JavaScript. The runtime environment interprets JavaScript using Google's V8 JavaScript engine.

Node.js has an event-driven architecture capable of asynchronous I/O. These design choices are meant to optimize throughput and scalability in Web applications with many input/output operations, as well as for real-time Web applications (e.g., real-time communication programs and browser games).

The most-used programming language

According to the StackOverflow survey for developers in 2015, JavaScript remains the most-used programming language. Node.js and AngularJS are busting out. Java is still the #1 server side language (and the most frequently used tag on Stack Overflow). The C's continue to hold on strong.

alt


Why Node.js:
1.Quick prototyping

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime that uses the V8 engine developed by Google for use in Chrome. V8 compiles and executes JavaScript at lightning speeds mainly due to the fact that V8 compiles JavaScript into native machine code.

In addition to lightning fast JavaScript execution, the real magic behind Node.js is the event loop. The event loop is a single thread that performs all I/O operations asynchronously.

Traditionally, I/O operations either run synchronously (blocking) or asynchronously by spawning off parallel threads to perform the work. This old approach consumes a lot of memory and is notoriously difficult to program. In contrast, when a Node application needs to perform an I/O operation, it sends an asynchronous task to the event loop, along with a callback function, and then continues to execute the rest of its program. When the async operation completes, the event loop returns to the task to execute its callback.

In other words, reading and writing to network connections, reading/writing to the filesystem, and reading/writing to the database–all very common tasks in web apps–execute very, very fast in Node. Node allows you to build fast, scalable network applications capable of handling a huge number of simultaneous connections with high throughput.

2.Easily scalable

It makes extremely easy to prototype (almost) any kind of web application in a shorter time when compared with others like for example JAVA and LAMP. Just to mention some savings in time: node.js provides the web server module itself, so you don't have to own knowledge about setting up Apache or NGINX unless you want to integrate in the existing platform or you have a complex system architecture. The very active node.js community provides ready-to-use modules and deep knowledge that can save you time when it comes to develop commodity features (Facebook-Connect, RESTful API, templating).

3.Super productive: use a single language on Server side, Client side and Mobile

The fact that JavaScript is the language of the browser made it necessary for all web developers to deal with it. This means that almost every developer can read JavaScript, and there are more and more people capable of writing good, solid, robust client JavaScript applications. Having node.js in the backend brings other kind of problems like layered architecture, Domain Model Design, MVC and correct use of design patterns which developers are typically used to solve using other languages like PHP, JAVA, Python, RoR, but coffescript constitutes a valid bridging gap translator language between the clssical OO inheritance and prototypal ones like JavaScript, helping not savvy new re-discovered node.js developers to avoid silly mistakes and filtering out the bad part of JavaScript.

4.World leading companies have already switched to Node.js

All of these companies (and many more not listed, like Intel, HP and IBM) have published either extensive reports or blog articles on how they evaluated all the technology out there and switched to Node for either their flagship products or their new products.

alt

As with any platform or product, open-source or otherwise, its community is a huge influencing factor. And Node's is second to none. From meetups to conferences, there are really smart people working on the ecosystem every day. At the same time, the community is welcoming. These same smart people are always willing to offer help to folks new to Node, or even programming in general. You won't feel bad for asking a question on IRC or opening an issue. This community is also very active, with over 91,000 modules on NPM. And this community is generous. In 2013, individuals donated over $70,000 to help run the public NPM servers.

Yes, Node is trendy at the moment. This is web development, so next week Node may be dead, and the next hot thing will have arrived. But give it a try and contact Node.js development company.

Was this helpful?
like like
dislike dislike
Subscribe to our blog

Get the inside scoop on industry news, product updates, and emerging trends, empowering you to make more informed decisions and stay ahead of the curve.

Let’s turn ideas into action
award-1
award-2
award-3
RossKurhanskyi linkedin
Ross Kurhanskyi
Head of partner engagement