Why Developers prefer Node.js for web application development services?

With the rising popularity of JavaScript, both developers and entrepreneurs prefer to write their web applications in Node.js for many reasons and that’s why it is making waves in the community! It was as simple as an unconquerable Everest to the present generation web applications we experience now developed in Node.js at the days when Flash and Java Applets were all about. Today, millions of web applications run in Node.js accelerating the world. But still many beginners and startup entrepreneurs don’t know the exceptional functionalities of Node.js and how it gonna suit their websites most appropriately. Let’s invade more into knowing what’s Node.js, and how and why it’s preferred.

What is Node.js?

Node.js, an open source, is basically a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. In other words, Node.js is a way of running JavaScript on the server. Things are lightweight, efficient, and perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices using an event-driven, non-blocking (asynchronous) I/O model in Node.js.

Node.js applications are written in JavaScript, C, and C++and can be run on OS X, Microsoft Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. It uses the Google V8 JavaScript engine to execute code.

It was in 2009, Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, introduced Node.js being inspired after seeing a file upload progress bar on Flickr which didn’t know how many files had been uploaded.

If you see millions of web applications based on Node.js, just imagine how powerful the tool is in the present internet generation. Of course, tons would be the reasons for developers to write programs in Node.js. Following are the major of them.

JavaScript being the pivot

JavaScript is the only and ultimate choice for developers to implement applications in the browser. Every week new-new framework gets introduced. Being quirky, object-oriented developers use it consistently and driving JavaScript interpreters forward so that Google’s V8 engine goes fast like anything.

Things are fast

Node is developed in an asynchronous programming model apart from the traditional model, and using V8 engine things are done within no time. However, the event loop is the real killer here. The event loop is a single thread that performs all I/O operations, but asynchronously, which in contrast with olden days that consumes a lot of memory and is hardly programmed to the perfect. In short, Node allows you to build fast, scalable network applications capable of handling concurrent connections.

The master at real-time duties

If you’re going to implement a social engaging app, Node gonna be a handy stuff. Things are excellent with Node especially for multi-user, real-time web applications like chat and games. Here the event loop does the job taking care the multi-user requirement.

Share, care and grow

The motto itself of the Node.js community is “share gleefully.” You can share packages of library code. It’s legally and officially encouraged. While using the tool, others also contribute for the current problems faced by other developers.

Streaming Data

HTTP requests are treated by web frameworks and are responded as whole data, which are in fact I/O streams. We know that Node.js ia good at handling I/O, which is truly an advantage and help us bring down the total time consumed. For an instance, we can possibly transcode audio or video files while uploading them.

Synchronizes data between client and server

Node allows to write JavaScript on client and server side, which makes things simpler as data is transferred between the two within no time. Meteor is the web app used in such a case, which runs a single codebase on both client and server. This next generation app helps to update things automatically when any data comes in.

In short

Node.js is a server-side and network application development framework that makes use of event-driven asynchronous I/O. It mainly uses JavaScript and bridges the gap between front-end and server side.

Node makes things exceptionally fast, which is a must especially in such a highly competitive environment. Ability to handle concurrent connections in real time is the major highlight of Node, which would have been collapsed using PHP. Yep! The next big thing is Node. Well, I think it is already!