The world of apps development is experiencing a revolutionary difference today owing to the rising popularity of JavaScript. Whatever magic app development companies are creating on the web these days having JavaScript running on the server, also in the browser, were almost impossible to imagine few years back.
Node.js is Google’s JavaScript engine, a packaged compilation with biluv platform, along with a core library that has been primarily documented in JavaScript. Simply stating, Node.js shines within the real-time web application development using push technology rather than websockets. How is that so revolutionary? After working for 20 years on stateless-web based platform on a paradigm based of stateless request-response, Node.js is finally a web application having real-time, two-way connections, and it is here that both server and client can trigger a communication, allowing free exchange of data. This is absolutely opposite to the traditional web response platform, where it is the client that always initiates any communication. Moreover, the platform is based upon web stack i.e, HTML, JS, and CSS that runs on the standard port 80. Hence, application developers looking to build on web stack can use Node.js to create newer applications.
How does Node.js work?
The prime idea of using Node.js is to use in non-blocking, I/O so that it remains lightweight and efficient so that real-time data-intensive applications can function across all distributed devices. Businesses looking to develop apps in Node.js need to realize that Node.js is not new platform that has come to dominate over the development domain but, something that fills specific needs. Any business should not use Node.js for CPU-based operations and using it for heavy computation would diminish all of the advantages it comes with. The best app development using Node.js is to create fast, scalable network apps, owing to its ability of handling huge number of parallel connections and can provides high scalability.
When you compare to the traditional techniques of web serving where every connections brings Node.js works on a single-thread, leveraging non-blocking I/O calls, hence allows it to support many concurrent connections that are connected in the event loop.
The Node Package manager (NPM)
The use of Node.js must include the built-in support for package management leveraging NPM, something that is attached in default with all installations of Node.js. The NPM module ideas are quite similar to Ruby Gems. Ruby gems are set of reusable, publicly available, components that are available via easy installation through an online library that comes with dependency and version management.
You could either use the NPM CLI tool or alternately there is a complete list of the packaged modules made available in the NPM website that receives automatic installation with Node.js. This module is available for all, and there is the provision for anyone to publish their module and it gets listed in the NPM library.
Certain most useful NPM modules used today are express, hapi, connect, socket.io, pug, redis, mongodb, etc.
Places where using Node.js could be useful
> Chat
An extremely multi-user, real-time application that has walked the journey from IRC to many open and proprietary protocols by functioning on non-standard ports, chat is the most friendly web development application that can implement everything in the present day in Node.js as it has webpockets functioning over standard port 80.
The sweetest Node.js example is the chat application, being a lightweight, data-intensive, high processing, but low computation application that can function across several devices. It is a wonderful application for learning as it is simple but still covers most of the paradigms the software developers use in a typical application within Node.js.
> Queued inputs
In case you are receiving a huge amount of concurrent data, you may experience data bottleneck. Concurrent connections can be easily handled by Node.js. However, as database access blocks operation, there is trouble. The ready solution is just acknowledgement of client behavior before the data gets truly jotted into the database.
Working with the approach, the system keeps its responsiveness within a heavy load. This is quite useful if the client does not need a confirmation that the data write is successful. Typical instances would be: the writing or logging of user-tracking data that is processed in different batches and is not used until later. Also, operations that aren’t required to be reflected rather instantly like updating of Likes count on the Facebook page where gradual consistency is accepted, Node.js is the best application.
In these applications, data gets queued using some kind of message queuing or caching module and digested by a different batch of backend services having computation intensive processing, or batch-write database process are written in platforms that are better performing. This behavior can be implemented with several other frameworks or languages, however not within the same hardware, with the same maintained, high throughput.
In simple words, using Node.js, businesses can push all database write offs to a side and work on them later, moving along as if they have succeeded.
> Data Streaming
In the highly traditional web frameworks, HTTP requests plus responses get treated or used as if they are isolated events. However, one must know that they are streams. The said observation could be leveraged within Node.js so that some really cool features are drawn. For instance, files that are still getting uploaded can be processed as the entire data comes in a stream; it is possible to process it in an online manner. This could be conducted for real-time video encoding or audio encoding and then proxying between several types of data sources.
> Proxy
Developers can easily employ Node.js as server side proxy where it is able to handle a number of simultaneous connections without blocking any applications. It is really useful in proxying several types of services that come with defferent ranges of response times, or in collecting data from several multiple sources.
> Dashboard for Stock Brokers
If we look at the application level, a platform where there is domination of desktop software we can understand the platform could be easily changed with web solutions in real-time. One of them is software for brokers trading that gets used in tracking stock prices, to perform technical analysis and calculations and finally in creating charts and graphs.
Switching over to web-based solutions in real-time would help brokers to readily switch their workstations enabling them to move readily anywhere and anytime. Node.js helps you improve business in case you are aware what your visitors are working on real-time and if you could gather their interactions. Node.js comes with two-way, real-time sockets that help you function with much flexibility.
Conclusion
You could use Node.js in server-side applications on web to create classic web based applications. However, the given request-respond paradigm would possibly while working around rendered function of HTML is not the rather highly typically use-case. There are several for and against arguments made for this and the facts that web application development company need to consider are:
Pros:
In case your app isn’t laced with any computing that is CPU intensive, you have the opportunity to build it from top to bottom in Javascript. The process helps in easing development for a significant rate.
For crawlers the response received is completely HTML rendered, something that is rather more SEO-friendly than, let us say an application that is single page or certain websockets app running on top of Node.js.
Cons:
Node.js will have its responsiveness blocked in case of any computation that is CPU intensive. Hence, a threaded platform is much better thought. You could also think of scaling out computing.
Node.js when used with relational database is rather a pain. It is better to use other relational operations to work seamlessly.
