What is NodeJS?
Node.js is an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime engine designed for building scalable network applications. It's a fast, lightweight, efficient, and scalable development environment built with Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine.
They use it to create I/O-intensive web applications such as video streaming sites, single-page applications, online chat applications, and a variety of other web apps. Node.js, which is based on Google Chrome's JavaScript-based runtime environment, offers numerous advantages over other server-side platforms such as PHP.
Why use NodeJS?
Node.js excels at real-time web applications that use push technology over WebSocket. After more than 20 years of stateless-web based on the stateless request-response paradigm, we now have web applications with real-time, two-way connections, where both the client and server can initiate communication, allowing them to exchange data more freely. This is in stark contrast to the typical web response paradigm, in which the client always initiates communication.
Because of its single-threaded and real-time push architectures, developers prefer Node.js for non-blocking, event-driven applications, and servers. It can also be useful for creating traditional web application backends and APIs.
Reasons why we might need to use NodeJS in web development
Scalability
Using microservice architecture and containerization, Node.js enables you to create applications that scale with the business. With almost no effort, you can achieve scalability and flexibility.
Performance
Node.js provides improved performance by utilizing Chrome's V8 Engine. It's a high-performance system, which is why companies like Uber and others adopted it in its early version in 2009.
Microservice
The microservice nature of Node.js is a huge benefit for maintainability. If you can divide a codebase into small chunks, it will be easier to maintain than a single bloated codebase.
Usability
Because of its microservice architecture, the ability to use one programming language in both front-end and back-end, and the availability of millions of libraries via NPM to serve your exact development needs, Node.js can optimize and speed up the web application development process.
How does it work?
Node excels at creating fast, scalable network applications. This is due to its ability to handle a large number of concurrent connections with high throughput.
To remain lightweight and efficient in the face of data-intensive real-time applications running across distributed devices, Node.js employs non-blocking, event-driven I/O.
Node.js is a platform that serves a specific purpose, and understanding this is critical. Node.js, for example, would not be used to perform CPU-intensive operations. If Node is used for heavy computation, nearly all of its advantages are lost.
Node.js accepts client requests and sends responses; when working with requests, Node.js handles them in a single thread. Threads are used by Node.js to perform I/O operations or requests. A thread is a set of instructions that the server must execute. It runs in parallel on the server to provide data to multiple clients. Node.js is a single-threaded event loop programming language. It can handle multiple requests concurrently with a single thread without blocking it for a single request.
The Top 5 Popular NodeJS Apps
PayPal
PayPal is one of the world's largest and most well-known fintech companies. The platform enables its users to conduct online transactions in over 100 currencies quickly and easily.
PayPal claims to have over 305 million active customer accounts (as of 2019). Node.js has been used by the company to build the consumer-facing side of its web applications.
LinkedIn is a business-focused social networking service founded in Mountain View, California in 2002. LinkedIn users can invite anyone (whether or not they are members of the site) to become a connection.
It is available in 24 languages and already has more than 706 million members in over 200 countries and territories. LinkedIn's mobile app's server side is powered by Node.js.
Yahoo
Yahoo is an American multinational technology company known for its web portal, search engine, and related services. Their search engine accounts for 1.65% of the search engine market, which has a total of 4.57 billion users.
Mozilla
Mozilla is a non-profit organization best known for its free, open-source web browser (Firefox), which is available in over 90 languages for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, and Firefox OS. Firefox has approximately 8.5% of global browser usage as of June 2020, making it the second most popular web browser.
Many of Mozilla's web projects use Node.js as their primary programming language. One of them is Mozilla Persona, a cross-platform sign-in technology.
Netflix
Netflix is the world's largest global provider of video streaming, including movies and television series, and is available in over 190 countries. As of July 2020, Netflix had over 192 million subscribers worldwide, with more than 72 million in the United States alone.
The entire user interface at Netflix is built with Node. The technology has proven to be so effective that the company intends to use it in additional layers of the stack.
There are many other examples like Uber, Groupon, GoDaddy, eBay etc.
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