See-Docs & Thenavigo

Feb 04, 2024

Getting Started with NodeJs

Node.js is an open-source JavaScript software platform designed for highly competitive, event-driven network applications that need to scale.

As an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime, Node.js is designed to build scalable network applications. In the following "hello world" example, many connections can be handled concurrently. Upon each connection, the callback is fired, but if there is no work to be done, Node.js will sleep

- Node is a runtime environment for executing JS code.

- Essentially, Node is a C++ program that embeds Chrome’s v8 engine, the fastest

JS engine in the world.

- We use Node to build fast and scalable networking applications. It’s a perfect

choice for building RESTful services.

- Node applications are single-threaded. That means a single thread is used to

serve all clients.

- Node applications are asynchronous or non-blocking by default. That means

when the application involves I/O operations (eg accessing the file system or the

network), the thread doesn’t wait (or block) for the result of the operation. It is

released to serve other clients.

- This architecture makes Node ideal for building I/O-intensive applications.

- You should avoid using Node for CPU-intensive applications, such as a video

encoding service. Because while executing these operations, other clients have

to wait for the single thread to finish its job and be ready to serve them.

- In Node, we don’t have browser environment objects such as window or the

document object. Instead, we have other objects that are not available in

browsers, such as objects for working with the file system, network, operating system, etc.