Backend Web development using Node.js

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform runtime environment used for the development of server-side web applications. Node.js applications are written in JavaScript and can be run on a wide variety of operating systems.

We will have a look into the real worth of Node.js in this course, but what is it that makes this framework so famous. Over the years, most of the applications were based on a stateless request-response framework. In these sort of applications, it is up to the developer to ensure the right code was put in place to ensure the state of web session was maintained while the user was working with the system. But with Node.js web applications, you can now work in real-time and have a 2-way communication. The state is maintained, and either the client or server can start the communication.

Node.js is used by many large companies. Below is a list of a few of them.

• Paypal – A lot of sites within Paypal have also started the transition onto Node.js.
• LinkedIn – LinkedIn is using Node.js to power their Mobile Servers, which powers the iPhone, Android, and Mobile Web products.
• Mozilla has implemented Node.js to support browser APIs which has half a billion installs.
• eBay hosts their HTTP API service in Node.js

Node.js is best for usage in streaming or event-based real-time applications like

• Chat applications
• Game servers – Fast and high-performance servers that need to processes thousands of requests at a time, then this is an ideal framework.
• Good for the collaborative environment – This is good for environments which manage documents. In a document management environment, you will have multiple people who post their documents and do constant changes by checking out and checking in documents. So Node.js is good for these environments because the event loop in Node.js can be triggered whenever documents are changed in a document managed environment.
• Advertisement servers – Again here you could have thousands of request to pull advertisements from the central server and Node.js can be an ideal framework to handle this.
• Streaming servers – Another ideal scenario to use Node is for multimedia streaming servers wherein clients have request’s to pull different multimedia contents from this server.