About Node.js

Posted by Codepianist on Oct 28, 2018 in JS, Node.JS | 0 comments

Node.js

What’s Node.js ?

• It’s Javascript code running on backend servers.
• Uses V8/Chakra as default Javascript VM.
• Node.js offers a set of features to develop server side applications, as Asynchronous APIs and so on.

Why Node.js? (+):

• It comes with a lot helpfull and free built-in modules.
• Uses the reliable package manager NPM, combined with CommonJS require function to easely manage and resolve dependencies.
• Asynchronous by nature leveraged by non-blocking IO, makes your life a lot easier when performing async operations. HTTP, HTTP2, HTTPS operations, or IO operations, like reading and writing files are async my nature and don’t consume the main thread.
• Allow calls to C++ code.
• Offers a debugger to inspect your code at runtime.
• Allow you to use the same language: Javascript, in both back and front end, and doing so leverage the real power of ‘full stack’ because makes easy to teams to share responsabilities.

Why not? (-):

• Changes constantly and breaks backward compability.
• Dispose of non-blocking nature, it’s single thread and isn’t not suitable for performing long-running calculations. Heavy computations block the incoming requests, which can lead to decrease of performance .
• So many options of libraries to choose, and some of then still imature and lacking of documentation;
• Event drive way of thinking don’t present a easy learning curve.