Recently, Node.js has caught attention of app development companies worldwide. It is a very powerful JavaScript based framework built on Google Chrome’s JavaScript V8 Engine. Node.js framework is mainly used for developing highly interactive web applications like social networking sites, video streaming sites, single-page applications, online shopping sites, and many other types of applications. One of the major reasons of Node.js popularity is that it is open source, easy to learn, which makes it easily available to developers worldwide and it’s completely free.
Not just that Node.js is open source and free of cost, it offers great scalability and agility, allows reuse of the codes, which reduces labor costs at greater extent allowing rapid application development. In this era of mobile apps, companies need such platform that can cater to the fast paced demand and launch apps in less time-to-market.
As per the survey conducted by the Node.js Foundation, with over 3.5 million users and an annual growth rate of 100 percent, Node.js is emerging as a universal platform used for web applications, IoT, and enterprise. The Node.js User Survey report features insights on emerging trends happening in this massive community that serves as a leading indicator on trends like microservices architectures, real-time web applications, Internet of Things (IoT).
Node.js is increasingly used for enterprise application development, and used within huge enterprises like Intel, PayPal, Uber, Go Daddy, Groupon, Capital One, etc. It over 150.000 modules that are readily available to be used. It facilitates faster development life cycle and saves lot of time and resources. Here are certain points that makes the Node.js platform a rule changer and revolutionary for app development:
A Boon for Developers – Technical Facts
- It has a two-way communication model that is far faster than the traditional process of request -response.
- There is no need for transposing app logic as requesting and receiving ends are communicating through same language.
- The developers working on java or even on any other programming languages can easily understand or learn JavaScript, which facilitates project ramp-up quickly.
- Node.js is able to synchronize without the use of memory intensive threads, therefore a single server can handle about 20 X the load produced by Java. Developers are not require to manage I/O blocking and threads.
- Network load is distributed by executing the page rendering code on either the client and server sides, prevents from slowing down the network.
- Node.js websockets run on TCP and not HTTP, which results in low-overhead client-server communication enabled in both directions.
- Node.js – and JavaScript in general – is excellent for quick iteration; programs can be inspected and errors can be addressed on the fly without requiring a restart, so developers can publish and deploy new code constantly.
- Developers are able to use single language and portable code base, for developing both frontend and backend, which consequently saves lot of time, money and efforts.
Achieve High Performance
The Node.js platform offers robust features that are designed to create real-time, multi-user, interactive, and collaborative web apps and enterprise apps that supports multiple operating systems and network connections. Not just that Node.js can help developers achieve higher productivity, but it also helps in creating the application which can achieve supreme level of performance.
Related to read: Why Choose Node.js over Java for Enterprise Development Platform?
There are many case studies of Node.js used by big enterprises for creating applications to serve millions of users. For example, Walmart, one of the biggest retailers in USA have used Node.js for building its online apps. On occasions like Black Friday or Christmas, there is approx. 1.5 billion dollars of business comes from online sales and around 500 millions of customers do online shopping. For handling the traffic of such a huge number of users, there is a need of a robust web application and Node.js was able to build the same for Walmart.
Recent case study of world’s largest cab services provide, Uber, also used Node.js for building its ride-sharing platform. “Node.js is particularly well-suited to writing systems that have all their state in memory,” said Kris Kowal, a Software Engineer at Uber. They do not have to externalize the concerns of a distributed system. As a consequence, the systems can be more available, and they can respond more quickly to requests by eliminating the reading/writing and the serialization of state into a database.
“One of the things that makes Node.js uniquely suited to running in production is that you can inspect and change a program without restarting it. Uber is now doing over two million RPCs per second at peak across the Node.js fleet”, says Ranney from Uber.
Open Source Community for Optimization
This is one of the major strengths of Node.js that it has an open source community named as Node.js Foundation, which is a community of developer or programmers from around the world who are actively involved in tracking the problems encountered or reported by the users/developers. They are enthusiastic for not just supporting the users for resolving issues, but also come up with new features and releases to optimize the technology and make Node.js the strongest platform for apps development.
Due to the strengths that Node.js offers, enterprises are able to create the apps that are incurring low costs and high performance, lessening headaches of developers. Consequently making developers happy. And its high performance and faster run time is giving ultimate experience to its users.
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