Developers use Node.js solutions to use JavaScript for writing command-line tools and server-side scripts outside a browser. Application of Node.js goes beyond just web application development.

Cloud computing and hosting solutions provider Joyent initially sponsored Node.js. Today, different contributors from around the world actively maintain this excellent enterprise app development environment. To hire Node.js developer is being extensively considered for cross-platform development by enterprises.

What is Node.js?

Node.js is a run-time built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. It is an open-source server environment that uses the event-callback approach. This popular tool comes in handy for a lot of projects. You can use it for backend servers, API development, micro-services, automation, and scripting.

Main Features of Node.js

• Asynchronous event model

  Node.js library’s APIs are all asynchronous. It means that a server using Node.js moves to the next API after calling it instead of waiting for an API to return data. It has a robust notification mechanism that enables the server to respond to the previous API call.

• Very fast

  Node.js library is built on Google Chrome’s V8 JavaScript Engine. Apart from this, all of the I/O methods in the Node.js standard library are non-blocking and execute asynchronously. All these features make it superfast in code execution.

• Better performance

  It utilizes a single-threaded model with event looping that makes the server highly scalable compared to the conventional servers. Node.js’ single-threaded program can cater to more requests than its traditional counterpart like Apache HTTP Server.

• Zero buffering

  Node.js applications never buffer any data. These applications output the data in chunks, thus rendering zero buffering.

How does it work?

Rather than using multiple languages for server and client-side scripts, it uses a single programming language, Java-script, for real-time web application development, allowing free data exchange across the server and client-side. Thus, it brings a miraculous transformation to an age-old standard based on a stateless web & request-response. Node.js has given way to a realm of real-time web applications furnishing two-way connections.

Unlike its traditional counterparts, Node.js operates on a single thread and utilizes non-blocking I/O calls. It doesn’t need a large memory footprint to support multiple connections and facilitates the orchestration of all the tasks running in parallel. It can support many concurrent connections held in the event loop. Node.js can handle over 1M concurrent connections.

Where to Use Node.js?

Node.js today is the first choice of any software developer. Node.js is a perfect technology partner for I/O bound Applications, Data Streaming Applications, Data Intensive Real-time Applications (DIRT), JSON APIs based Applications. However, avoid using it for CPU intensive applications. Node has a single-threaded, asynchronous event model. Upon launching a Node process, a single process runs with a single thread on a single core. The long-running CPU tasks can block the entire server. So, using node for CPU intensive applications is not a good idea.

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