Nate Murray - Fullstack Node.js

Node.js was first released in 2009 by Ryan Dahl as a reaction to how slow web servers were at the time. Most web servers would block for any I/O task, such as reading from the file system or accessing the network, and this would dramatically lower their throughput. For example, if a server was receiving a file upload, it would not be able to handle any other request until the upload was finished.

At that time, Dahl mostly worked with Ruby, and the dominant model for web applications was to have a pool of ruby processes that a web server (e.g. Ngninx) would proxy to. If one Ruby process was blocked with an upload, Nginx served the request to another.

Node.js changed this model by making all I/O tasks non-blocking and asynchronous. This allowed web servers written in Node.js to serve thousands of requests concurrently subsequent requests didnt have to wait for previous ones to complete.

The first demo of Node.js was generated so much interest because it was the first time that a developer could create their own web server easily and have it work so well.

Over time Node.js became good at system tasks other than web serving and started to shine as a flexible yet lower level server-side language. It could do anything typically done with Python, Ruby, Perl, and PHP, and it was faster, used less memory, and in most cases had better APIs for the system calls.

For example, with Node.js we can create HTTP and TCP servers with only a few lines of code. Well dive in and build one together soon, but just to show what we mean, heres a functioning Node.js web server in only 80 characters:

Node.js began to shine with the introduction of npm, the package manager bundled with Node.js. A core philosophy of Node.js is to have only a small collection of built-in modules that come preinstalled with the language.

Examples of these modules are fs, http, tcp, dns, events, child_process, and crypto. Theres a full list in the Node.js API documentation.

This may seem to be a bad thing. Many people would be puzzled as why Node.js would choose not to have a large collection of standard modules preinstalled and available to the user. The reason is a bit counterintuitive, but has ultimately been very successful.

Node.js wanted to encourage a rich ecosystem of third-party modules. Any module that becomes a built-in, core module will automatically prevent competition for its features. In addition, the core module can only be updated on each release of Node.js.

This has a two-fold suppression effect on module authorship. First, for each module that becomes a core module in the standard library, many third-party modules that perform a similar feature will never be created. Second, any core modules will have development slowed by the Node.js release schedule.

This strategy has been a great success. npm modules have grown at an incredible pace, overtaking all other package managers. In fact, one of the best things about Node.js is having access to a gigantic number of modules.

Node.js is a great choice for any task or project where one would typically use a dynamic language like Python, PHP, Perl, or Ruby. Node.js particularly shines when used for:

• HTTP APIs,
• distributed systems,
• command-line tools, and
• cross-platform desktop applications.

Node.js was created to be a great web server and it does not disappoint. In the next section, well see how easy it is to build an HTTP API with the built-in core http module.

Web servers and HTTP APIs built with Node.js generally have much higher performance than other dynamic languages like Python, PHP, Perl, and Ruby. This is partly because of its non-blocking nature, and partly because the Node.js V8 JavaScript interpreter is so well optimized.

There are many popular web and API frameworks built with Node.js such as express, hapi, and restify.

Distributed systems are also very easy to build with Node.js. The core tcp module makes it very easy to communicate over the network, and useful abstractions like streams allow us to build systems using composable modules like dnode.

Command-line tools can make a developers life much easier. Before Node.js, there wasnt a good way to create CLIs with JavaScript. If youre most comfortable with JavaScript, Node.js will be the best way to build these programs. In addition, there are tons of Node.js modules like yargs, chalk, and blessed that make writing CLIs a breeze.

Electron, allows us to build cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It combines a browser GUI with Node.js. Using Node.js were able to access the filesystem, network, and other operating system resources. Theres a good chance you use a number of Electron apps regularly.

Node.js is a dynamic, interpreted language. It is very fast compared to other dynamic languages thanks to the V8 JIT compiler. However, if you are looking for a language that can squeeze the most performance out of your computing resources, Node.js is not the best.

CPU-bound workloads can typically benefit from using a lower-level language like C, C++, Go, Java, or Rust. As an extreme example, when generating fibonacci numbers Rust and C are about three times faster than Node.js. If you have a specialized task that is particularly sensitive to performance, and does not need to be actively developed and maintained, consider using a lower-level level language.