There is, of course, the question of sharing a single thread among all client requests, a potential pitfall of writing Node.js applications.įirst, heavy computation could choke up Node’s single thread and cause problems for all clients, as incoming requests are blocked until said computation is completed. Node.js avoids all this, achieving high scalability levels. Add to this the cost of context-switching between threads, and you get a common scenario in traditional web-serving techniques. Per Michael Abernethy’s 2011 article “Just what is Node.js?”, take a thread with an accompanying 2 MB of memory, running on a system with 8 GB of RAM, and providing a theoretical maximum of 4,000 concurrent connections. It is not a silver bullet, or a platform that will dominate the web development world. Node.js is a platform that fills a particular need. Nearly all of Node’s advantages are annulled if it’s used for heavy computation. For example, you wouldn’t use Node.js to perform CPU-intensive operations. Node.js is a platform that fills a particular need, and understanding this is absolutely essential. Node.js uses non-blocking, event-driven I/O to remain lightweight and efficient in the face of data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. This is due to its capability of handling a huge number of simultaneous connections with high throughput. Node really shines in building fast, scalable network applications. Plus, Flash and Java Applets were run in isolation and often operated over nonstandard ports, which may have required extra permissions. In reality, however, those were just sandboxed environments that used the web as a transport protocol to be delivered to the client. One might argue that we’ve had this technology for years in the form of Flash and Java Applets. This is in stark contrast to the typical web response paradigm, where the client always initiates communication. After over 20 years of stateless-web based on the stateless request-response paradigm, we finally have web applications with real-time, two-way connections, where both the client and server can initiate communication, allowing them to exchange data more freely. Node.js shines in real-time web applications employing push technology over WebSocket. Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js was “inspired by applications like Gmail” and-in creating Node.js-aimed to create real-time websites with push capability.Īfter over 20 years of stateless-web based on the stateless request-response paradigm, we finally have web applications with real-time, two-way connections. Node.js provides developers a comprehensive tool for working in the non-blocking, event-driven I/O paradigm. Additionally, Node.js is based on the open web stack (HTML, CSS, and JS), and operates over the standard port 80. Node.js is composed of Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, the libUV platform abstraction layer, and a core library that is written in JavaScript. This Node.js tutorial addresses how to realize these advantages and why you might-or might not-use Node.js.

With all of its advantages, Node.js plays a critical role in the technology stack of many high-profile companies who depend on its unique benefits. As this is more a benefit of JavaScript than Node.js specifically, we won’t elaborate further. The things we do on the web nowadays were hard to imagine just several years ago.īefore we dig into Node.js (“Node”) solutions, consider that applying JavaScript across the stack to unify the language and data format (JSON), would facilitate the optimal reuse developer resources.

JavaScript’s popularity has brought with it a lot of changes. It has been modified to include recent sources and to align with our current editorial standards. Editor’s note: The English version of this article was updated on by our editorial team.

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