• November 06, 2020 4:43 pm
• by Aruthra

According to a recent survey, 60% of high-profile enterprises (even NASA) around the world rely on Node.js. Multi Billion Companies such as PayPal, Uber, eBay, and many other enterprises around the world hire Node.js developers for building powerful backends for their enterprise apps.

A lot of us confuse Node.js as a backend framework or even as a programming language. But what exactly is Node.js? Node.js is simply a runtime environment for JavaScript Code. Similar to that of a browser, Node.js contains a JavaScript engine that can execute our code. It also has certain objects that provide an environment for your JavaScript code. However, the objects that are in Node.js are entirely different from the environment objects that you see in your browsers.

The cool thing about Node.js is that it executes JavaScript code outside of a browser.

In a nutshell, Node.js is a program that embeds a JavaScript engine (Google’s V8 engine with a different run time) to run inside a C++ program.

How does Node.js work?

Because of the non-blocking or asynchronous nature of Node, apps that are made using Node.js are highly scalable. You must be now wondering what asynchronous architecture is all about. We will dive into that below:

Asynchronous architecture of Node.js

Before diving into asynchronous architecture, let’s talk about synchronous architecture. The latter uses multiple threads to handle multiple requests, uses blocking I/O calls. Applications built with frameworks such as ASP.NET use this architecture by default. In synchronous architecture, app threads that are assigned to serve a client can’t be used to serve another client. A new thread is spawned to serve another client with every request. If we have a large number of concurrent clients in the event loop, we will run out of threads to serve these clients. This takes up system RAM and max-outs the amount of RAM available. The only solution that we can do to evade this situation is to add more hardware.

Architecture of Node.js:

In contrast to blocking or synchronous architecture, Node.js uses a single-threaded, event-driven architecture. This architecture on the other hand allocates a single thread to handle multiple requests. This means, If you want to query a database, your thread doesn’t have to wait for the database to return the data. While the database is executing your query, that same thread will be used to serve another client which is not the case with synchronous architecture. This allows applications built with Node.js to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections held in the event loop.

Advantages of using Node.js

• Shallow Learning Curve:

If you know JavaScript, it will be pretty much easier for you to learn and build Node.js applications. However, you will need to adapt with its asynchronous non-blocking programming architecture.

• High Performance:

The asynchronous architecture of Node.js allows it to efficiently handle thousands of concurrent connections held in the event loop. This brings up the speed and performance of apps written in Node,js. Moreover, it uses Google Chrome’s V8 engine as its JavaScript runtime. This makes it ideal for building data-intensive and real-time applications that consume a lot of disk or network access.

• Low Development Cost:

As Node.js works on JavaScript, your front end developers can reuse JavaScript code. They can build both the frontend and backend of your application even If your in-house team lacks backend developers. Choosing Node.js as your backend framework eliminates the need for you to hire developers for both frontend and backend. This significantly reduces your web app development costs.

• Scalability:

Asynchronous architecture of Node.js allows it to remain as a lightweight and highly performant run time in data-intensive real-time applications. Hence it can be used to build highly scalable and fast network applications.