What makes the JavaScript community happy?
A sure answer is a Node.js technology that shines in the world of real-time web application development. The technology is created in 2009 by Ryan Dahl to solve many issues related to app performance.
It is worth choosing node.js as the next technology to learn as it allows you to use JavaScript both at the server and client-side. In this article, we are going to explore technology and its basic concepts every node.js beginner must know.
Well, before that check this out:
Major insights of Node.js
Big organizations such as PayPal, eBay, Netflix, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Tumbler use Node.js.
More than 50% of the developers use Node.jsin their projects.
According to the Stack Overflow developers survey, it is among the top 10 most popular technologies used by developers.
It helps to reduce development costs by 58% and increase application performance by 50%.
85% of the users use it primarily for web app development.
Serverless friendly technology.
You can find more information about Node.js insights here.
What is Node.js and why do we need it?
Node.js is an asynchronous event-driven javascript runtime built on the V8 JavaScript engine, designed to build scalable network applications.
JavaScript is the only language Node.js supports natively but many languages can be directly compiled to JS.
Why do we need Node.js?
Node.js eliminates the limitations of the multithread approach with its single-threaded characteristic.
Unlike PHP where most functions are blocked until their completion, Node.js functions are nonblocking which means commands are executed concurrently or even in parallel without blocking other commands using callbacks and other advanced mechanisms.
There are build-in modules and multiple libraries built by the developer community that simplifies and speeds up the app development process.
Basic Concept in Node.js
If you are a beginner then you must have a good understanding of following Node.js concepts.
- Node.js as an event-driven technology
Node.js makes extensive use of events that means the control flow of the server-side platform is driven by occurrences of events. When the application starts, it initializes the variables and functions, and then the event listener calls the Event loop.
The Event loop is nothing but a single thread that receives incoming requests. These requests are checked and executed if they are nonblocking and the blocking request is allocated to the background thread in the worker’s pool. Meanwhile, the event loop waits until the background thread completes its operation and gives the result back to the event loop.
There are mainly two-component of event-driven programming:
Event handlers
Event Loop
2. Node.js applications run on the single thread
JavaScrip is the single-threaded programming language and thus the Node.js applications are single-threaded.
A Node.js app can deal with multiple events at a time using a single thread(Event loop). However, when you look into its architecture you will find that there are background threads (worker threads) running in the background that carry out CPU-intensive tasks.
The above arrangement allows Node.js to perform non-blocking operations.
(Note: Worker treads were introduced in the Node.js version 11.7.0 and above, if you are using the prior version, enable it using — experimental-worker flag when invoking Node.js)
3. NPM- A package manager for Node.js
NPM (Node package manager) is the world’s largest open-source library. Using the NPM package manager you can install the packages you want to build the app faster. Also, you can install custom modules(independent node.js components) using NPM.
Conclusion:
In this short article, we have learned about Node.js, why we need it, and its basic concepts. Now, you have a basic understanding of how Node.js works.
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