4 Vital Reasons to Use Node.js for Web Application Development

What exactly is Node.js?

Node.js is a cross-platform open-source platform for developing real-time network applications. It has an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model, which makes it lightweight and efficient, according to nodejs.org. It is nevertheless light in in-memory utilisation compared to data-intensive real-time web apps that run on other devices. In addition, Node.js employs push technology rather than web sockets to create server-side web applications with two-way connections. Node.js operates on the standard port 80 and utilises open web stack technologies such as JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

In the 2017 Node.js User Survey Report, Node.js has approximately 7 million users and a 100% annual growth rate. In addition, it shows that Node.js is predicted to grow rapidly among programming languages over 12 months, with a 71% increase and depicts the findings from 64,000 developers who participated in the annual survey in January 2017.

Node.js is becoming more popular as developers are lured to the benefits of utilising Node.js, which include speed, ease of use, complete stack capability, asynchronous programming, community, and available modules. Because Node.js isn't going away anytime soon, you should understand the benefits of adopting it for web application development as a developer.

Here's a quick recap:

1. Ease of Use and Speed

Node.js uses Google's V8 engine, which converts JavaScript into native machine code and runs exceptionally quickly. I/O operations are often performed synchronously or asynchronously by dispatching parallel threads to complete the work. Node.js runs on a single line, also known as an event loop, which eliminates the need to create separate threads of operations, resulting in speedier results.

Common activities in online applications, such as reading and writing databases, network connections, and filesystems, may be performed more quickly using Node.js.

The primary reasons for this programming language's appeal are the variety of making front-end, back-end, clip, and all in between, the agility of getting the programme running, and the quality of performance.

2. Capability to Perform All Tasks

Node.js may be used to create both front-end and back-end web applications. The full-stack capability of Node.js eliminates the need to hire a separate developer for back-end and front-end development. By keeping front-end and back-end programming consistent, this feature of Node.js contributes to the simplicity of adding, altering or removing data in your database through the application.

Node.js enables developers to create JavaScript on both the server and client sides. Developers can keep data in its raw format from the browser to the disc. Eliminating the translating from client to server data contributes to Node.js' developer-friendliness.

3. Programming Asynchronously

Asynchronous programming is used by Node.js, in which a unit of work works independently from the main application thread and tells the caller thread of its completion, failure, or progress. For example, when a Node.js web application has to conduct an I/O operation, it sends an asynchronous, non-blocking task to the event loop, along with a callback function, and proceeds with the rest of its programme. The event loop returns to the task after the asynchronous operation is performed.

This concept eliminates waiting and moves on to the next request. As a result, asynchronous programming can increase the performance and responsiveness of an application. Asynchronous event-driven IO aids concurrent request handling. It supports multiple simultaneous bids, in which incoming requests are executed sequentially in a loop.

Node.js can begin reading a file, assign a callback to it, and then go to the next file using this non-blocking code style. Other development platforms can start reading a file but cannot do anything else until the file is finished.

4. Various Modules Are Available

Node.js fosters collaboration, which has resulted in a vibrant community with a large amount of code shared throughout the internet. Node Package Manager (NPM) is the world's largest collection of open source libraries and provides available and reusable code among teams. With over 400,000 modules available, the NPM community is quite active. In their projects, developers can manage public or private code and dependencies. Several websites can be utilised to find or share code that will aid in the development process. Github and Stackoverflow are popular venues for communicating with and discovering code from other Node.js developers.

These forums allow users to communicate with other developers in real-time and receive fast notifications and provide a large range of plugins that would be a perfect starting place for new developers to understand a codebase. Developers may save time, frustration, and energy by interacting with the community. In addition, there are multiple choices available to developers for getting source code and taking advantage of JavaScript's powerful file stream capabilities.

Conclusion

Node.js has established itself as a programming language leader, and its popularity is growing.

Node.js provides full-stack development capabilities for front-end and back-end code on a single platform, eliminating the need to engage two distinct front-end and back-end code engineers. Asynchronous programming in Node.js improves application performance and responsiveness by assisting with concurrent request management. Node.js includes built-in modules and a thriving community of resources that may be used as tools for developing web applications.

Because of positive factors such as the ones discussed above, many developers are becoming interested in using Node.js for web app development. Suppose the aforementioned top benefits have persuaded you to choose Node.js for your web app project. In that matter, the next stage is to research the top Node.js development companies and pick a company that best meets your requirements.