I would consider this as the best thing that javascript could offer. Wait. But what is this best thing? What is nodeJS? and why all the hype?
Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment, built on Chrome’s V8 engine. It could offer everything that you would need to execute a program developed with javascript.
Thanks to node.js, javascript doesn’t like a scripting language anymore, it is now capable of most of the features that a programming language could offer, and sometimes excels in it. I would like to highlight 2 of the most important things of node js, quoting directly from there official site.
• Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient.
nodejs.org
• Node.js’ package ecosystem, npm, is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world.
What is non blocking I/O? I/O is input and output, which takes time no matter what language you use. With pure/vanilla javascript you normally have to wait for an I/O task to finish to start the next because it blocks the other tasks or functions, hence the name I/O Blocking. With javascript event loop this could be minimized a lot.
The package ecosystem, similar to maven, but npm has it’s own and considered to be largest. And this helps us to save time. We could actually focus on something thats high priority and use a package for something small which has been done a 100 times a year.
A list of favourite packages,
- nodemon
- mongoosejs
- express-generator
- mssql
- material-ui
- reactjs
- bcrypt
- passport
- nodemailer
Design to Code 