The use of Node.js in web development has increased dramatically since its release in 2010. Node or Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, runtime environment that allows developers to create all kinds of server-side tools and applications in JavaScript. With early adopters such as LinkedIn, Paypal, and other tech companies, Node.js has seen an exponential increase in web development. The runtime of Node.Js is intended to run directly on a computer or server OS and outside the browser context. As such, the environment is not dependent on browser-specific JavaScript APIs and supports more traditional OS APIs including HTTP and file system libraries. Node.Js developers are in demand across the world, so much so that among the top ten most in-demand jobs, the number of jobs for Node.js developers alone has increased by around 2500%.
Node.Js benefits in web server development :
1) It is especially suitable for applications that require real time communication between client and server. Socket.io is a tool used for building things like chat applications really easy. This same features make Node.js suitable for applications that process data from IoT devices (Internet of Things) and Single Page Applications (SPAs).
2) Node was designed to optimize throughput and scalability in web applications and is a good solution for many common web-development problems .Code is written in “plain old JavaScript”. This means less time is spent dealing with “context shift” between languages when you are writing both client-side and server-side code.
3) The node package manager (NPM) provides access to hundreds of thousands of reusable packages. It provides best-in-class dependency resolution and can also be used to automate most of the build toolchain.
4) Node.js is portable. It is available on Microsoft Windows, macOS and so many other operating systems.It is also well-supported by many web hosting providers, that often provide specific infrastructure and documentation for hosting Node sites.
5) Many popular client-side frameworks such as React, Vue, and Angular are written in JavaScript which is the main language of modern browsers. With Node.js on server-side, you have all the benefits of one scripting language across your application development stack. When you have the same language both on the front and back end, it is excellent for maintainability: The work of all the team members, whether front end or backend becomes easier for your application because they all work with the same JavaScript data structures, functions, and language conventions.
6) If you learn Javascript, that will suffice. For Node.Js, you don’t need to learn another language like PHP. So you can spend all your efforts learning Javascript really well and mastering it. You will be able to write both frontend and backend code with just Javascript.
7) You get all the performance gain of V8 which is the Google JavaScript interpreter that Node.js is built on top of. Google’s engineering team is constantly improving the performance of V8,as a result Node.js gets the benefit of this development for free.
8) Node.js is well suited for applications that have a lot of concurrent connections and each request only needs very few CPU cycles. It is ideal for many applications currently on the internet like SPAs and real time applications.
9) Node.js comes with very few dependencies, rules and guidelines. This allows a developer to have the freedom and creativity in developing their applications the way they want to. They can select the best architecture, design patterns, modules and features for their project and get all the benefits from the community through NPM.
Web Development With Node and Express
Express is considered to be the most popular Node web framework. It is the underlying library for a number of other popular Node web frameworks.
Mechanisms provided by Express :
- Write handlers for requests with different HTTP verbs at different URL paths (routes).
- Integrate with “view” rendering engines in order to generate responses by inserting data into templates.
- Set common web application settings like the port to use for connecting, and the location of templates that are used for rendering the response.
- Add additional request processing “middleware” at any point within the request handling pipeline.
While Express itself is simple to use, developers have created compatible middleware packages to address almost any web development problem. It has libraries to work with cookies, sessions, user logins, URL parameters, POST data, security headers, and many more.
In a general scenario of a traditional website, a web application waits for HTTP requests from the web browser (or other client). When the application receives a request, it figures out what action is needed based on the URL pattern and the information contained in POST data or GET data. Depending on that it may then read or write information from a database or perform other tasks required to complete the request. Next, the application will return a response to the web browser, often dynamically creating an HTML page for the browser to display by inserting the retrieved data into placeholders in an HTML template.
With Express, you get methods to specify what function is called for a particular HTTP verb (GET, POST, SET, etc.) and URL pattern (“Route”). You also get methods to specify what template (“view”) engine is used, where template files are located, and what template to use to give a response. Even Express can be used as a middleware to add support for cookies, sessions, and users, getting POST/GET parameters, etc. Any database mechanism supported by Node can be used with Express.
