Some basic features of Node.JS
Node.js was developed by Ryan Dahl in 2009 and its latest version is v0.10.36. This is a server side platform designed on Google Chrome’s JavaScript Engine (V8 Engine). This application uses an event-driven, non-blocking input output model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data intensive real time applications that run into distributed devices. This is an open source and also cross platform runtime environment for developing server side and networking applications.
This applications are written in JavaScript, and might be run inside the runtime on Microsoft Windows, and Linux and also uses node package manager (NPM) and it’s very easy to use. NPM is the pre installed package manager for the server platform. It installs programs from the node package manager registry, organizing the installation and management of third-party programs.
It also provides a large library of various JavaScript modules that simplifies the development of web applications.
Following that the areas where Node.js is proving itself as an ideal technology partner.
- Data Streaming Applications
- Data Intensive Real-time Applications (DIRT)
- I/O bound Applications
- Single Page Applications
- JSON APIs based Applications
There are some of the important features in Node.js:-
Very Fast:- This library is very fast in code execution.
Asynchronous and Event Driven:- All APIs of in this library are asynchronous, that is non-blocking. It essentially means a Node.js based server never waits for an API to return data. And that server moves to the next Application Programming Interface (API) after calling it and a notification mechanism of Events of helps the server to get a response from the previous API call.
Single Threaded but Highly Scalable:- It uses a single threaded model with event looping and also 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 the limited threads to handle the requests. It uses a single threaded program and that same program provides service to a very large number of requests than traditional servers like Apache HTTP Server.
No Buffering:- These applications simply output the data in various parts. These type of applications never buffer any type of data.
License:- This is released under the MIT license.
Why we use node.js:-
Node.js uses JavaScript within the backend and that’s enough to understand how fast the codes execute. It runs on the Google’s V8 engine, that compiles the JavaScript directly into machine code making it faster than you will be able to imagine. Cluttered threads are no longer a problem, as one thread take care of multiple client requests with the help of the ‘event loop’. Scalability and rapid prototyping become a whole lot easier, whatever the application might be. The productivity of a web application will increases many folds with node.js because a lot of time is saved in between the lines.