Node.js overview | When to use Node.js?
Introduction:
In this blog post, we will talk about basics of Node.js, What is Node.js, What are the key features of Node.js and when to use Node.js and when not. So let’s get start.
What is Node.js?
According to official Node.js, Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. This V8 runtime allows executing the JavaScript code on any machine outside of a browser. This means that it is the server that executes the Javascript. In early days of Javascript, it was used to run in browsers only that’s why Javascript was just a client-side language. Nowadays JavaScript is a server-side language as well because of Node.js.
If you are reading this blog then you must know other programming languages as well. You know about C, C++, Java, Python Ruby, etc. All of these programming languages are multithreaded languages. It is not true with Node.js because Node.js is a single-threaded but event-driven programming language.Node.js employs a concurrency model based on an event loop. Therefore it doesn’t block the execution instead registers a callback which allows the application to run.
With help of this event-driven model, Node.js can handle concurrent operations without creating multiple threads of execution. Therefore we can say it a lightweight programming language. Even you can install Node.js in your mobile as well.
As Node.js runs on V8 Javascript engine, which is written in C++, along with this, Node.js also uses libuv to do things like interacting with the FIleIO and other asynchronous tasks.
What are the features of Node.js?
As most of the features are already described in above section. Lets understand key features on Node.js.
- Event-driven asynchronous environment: Although Node.js is single-threaded but it uses an event loop to process the incoming request. Almost all APIs of Node.js are asynchronous. It means that if a Node receives a request for some I/O task, it will execute that task in the background and continue with the processing of other executions. Thus it will not wait for the response from the previous executions and will not block the event loop as well.
- Single threaded but highly scalable: As Node.js has only one thread but it can handle a number of requests without any hassles. A lot of other servers launch threads to fulfill the requests but there is always a limit on the number of threads but Node.js has no limit.
- Wide range of libraries: As Node.js is an open-source community and lot of developers are well versed with Javascript. That makes other developers’ life easy. Node.js has a great package manager which npm. You can download any of the libraries from npmjs.com to integrate in your project.
- Memory efficient: Node.js is memory efficient as it does not buffer any data instead of this it sends data to a client in chunks.
When to use Node.js?
As Node.js is single-thread and event-driven Javascript runtime so it is advisable to use it in a event-based runtime applications or can be used as an streaming server.
Following are the areas where You can use Node.js.
- If your web application is I/O bound then Node.js is the best available solution in this planet.
- If you want to create a data streaming applications or data Intensive real-time applications (DIRT)
- You can use Node.js where CPU load is low for example to create a chat application or a streaming server.
- In my opinion, creating a Streaming Server in Node.js is a good choice because Node.js is good for I/O intensive tasks and Node.js can handle thousands of user requests simultaneously.
When not to use Node.js?
As we have seen that Node.js can be used as various places but on drawback of Node is that it is not built to do CPU intensive tasks. It can efficiently handle Input/Output operations not CPU intensive operations. If your application does lot of computation tasks then you should not use Node.js. The tasks which are CPU intensive and. takes a lot of processing time can block the event loop as we have just one thread.
Conclusion
That is my opinion on Node.js. As I stated that Node.js is single-threaded but current version of Node.js is not single-threaded at all. Node.js has introduced Worker-threads to simulate a multithreaded environment in Node.js. This is very exciting and fun at the same time.
In my opinion Future of web is Node.js.
#Happy Coding #TopCode.
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