Node.js

Node.js

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript runtime environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a browser. It allows developers to build scalable network applications using JavaScript on the server-side.
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serverside eventdriven nonblocking-io

Node.js: Open-Source JavaScript Runtime Environment

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript runtime environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a browser. It allows developers to build scalable network applications using JavaScript on the server-side.

What is Node.js?

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment that allows developers to build server-side and network applications with JavaScript. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient.

Some key features and benefits of Node.js:

  • Asynchronous and event-driven - All APIs of Node.js library are asynchronous. This makes it non-blocking and highly scalable as it doesn't wait for API to return data.
  • Very fast - Being built on Google Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, Node.js has a fast code execution.
  • Single threaded but highly scalable - Node.js uses a single threaded model with event looping. The event mechanism helps the server to respond in a non-blocking way and makes the server highly scalable as opposed to traditional servers which create limited threads to handle requests.
  • No buffering - Node.js applications never buffer any data. These applications simply output the data in chunks.
  • License - Node.js is released under the MIT license.

Some common use cases of Node.js include real-time web applications, network applications, JSON APIs based applications, single page applications, and as a supporting tech in full stack JavaScript development.

Node.js Features

Features

  1. Asynchronous and event-driven
  2. Very fast due to the V8 JavaScript engine
  3. Uses JavaScript for server-side scripting
  4. Large ecosystem of open source libraries
  5. Single threaded but highly scalable

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Very fast and efficient

Great for real-time web applications

JavaScript on both client and server side

Asynchronous I/O allows for high scalability

Large and active open source community

Cons

Not ideal for CPU-intensive applications

Relatively new technology with limited enterprise support

Callback hell can make complex code hard to manage

Less robust ecosystem of tools and IDEs compared to other backends


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