Introduction
We all have heard about the hype surrounding Node, although now it has stabilized in popularity as years have passed, but do you know the reasons why it is so adored in the developer community? Why it has been the main choice for businesses and why do they tend to hire Node.js developers? This blog will help you with what all the hype is about.
What is Node?
Node.js development
Node is an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime environment built on the powerful Chrome V8 engine. Node was created by Ryan Dahl in 2009, back then Apache was more popular but struggled with concurrent connections. Ryan Dahl designed Node to overcome this problem. Node was able to overcome this issue and offer more scalability and parallel code execution. All Node applications are written in JavaScript. Node also provides easy and fast development along with great performance.
Why should businesses go with Node?
Some of the main reasons developers use Node are explained below:
- Node provides lightweight development in enterprise.
- Node also provides around 4,00,000 npm packages to use in your application.
- The language is similar for both Front-end and Back-end developers, this makes the development process easier.
- It provides scalability
- It doesn’t have a large learning curve.
- It is very extensible
- Node has lots of hosting providers
How relevant is Node in 2022?
The tech industry is one of the fastest-moving industries. One has to always keep improving or learning to keep up with the pace. In such a knowledge-based industry, often we feel that new things will come and go. Some technologies have a good rise but fall quickly to the ground. This makes a developer who has just joined this industry question what he/she must focus on and learn. Node has really found its niche in applications where high number of concurrent connections and high amounts of traffic is occurring. Node is comparatively new when compared to other frameworks and such. Node topped the 2020 charts in terms of usage in back-end and server-side applications. Many major companies have shifted to Node once it became popular. They realized how useful and powerful Node can be. Major companies like Netflix, Uber, PayPal, Trello etc. have shifted their stack to Node. This pretty much shows how much trust is being put into Node. Many mid-tier and startups also have focused on hiring Node developers. It is safe to say that Node is not going away anytime soon.
Although as the end of the pandemic is coming around (hopefully!) Node has taken a slight dip in the popularity charts. This does not mean Node is not adored anymore or Node isn’t reliable. All languages and frameworks have slight dips in usage from time to time. Node might not be amongst the top members in terms of popularity, but it is still in the top 10.
What do companies love about Node?
- Node is a language that is mainly used by developers to create backend environments, web applications, servers, and APIs.
- But Node can also be used to create microservices and websites. Yes! Node can be used to create Frontend as well. To be accurate about 6.5% of developers used Node to create a Frontend for their projects in 2022.
- Developers prefer Node because of the many use cases it can fulfill. From making a CLI to rendering React Apps, Node can do it all.
- Node is also used in making management systems, Scripting, Automation, Authentication, Remote Systems Monitoring, and more.
- Node is also very developer-friendly. Not only that, but it is also cross-platform compatible. This is something developers really appreciate as it gives them the flexibility to use anything from Linux to Windows as a platform to develop upon.
- For beginners, there is a smaller learning curve. Meaning it is easier for freshers to get into, especially if you have prior knowledge of JavaScript.
- One of the reasons Node became so popular was its ability to scale. So of course, developers prefer Node for its scalability. Node’s ability to handle concurrent connections is what makes it so admired amongst devs and major companies like Netflix.
- The speed of Node is undeniable. Node is very light and fast, making it an obvious choice for developers to pick. Although it is not the fastest in the market but still provides enough speed to be top tier.
- Node has many developers around and a very strong community. This makes it easy to solve problems that might arise once you are getting into Node or are already an experienced developer.
- As mentioned above, hosting is not an issue for Node. As the popularity of Node grew many hosting providers added the ability to simply host Node.JS applications. Heroku and DigitalOcean are some of the many well-known hosting providers.
With all these great things said about Node it definitely seems that Node is the way to go. But is Node all pros and no cons? Well, that is not the case. There are some issues with Node as well. Some can be avoided; others need a workaround or simply cannot be avoided. So let us look at the cons of Node.
What do developers dislike about Node?
Node also has some things that developers wish it didn’t have. Some of those things are as follows:
- Node cannot handle CPU-intensive tasks:
- Node can handle most tasks because of its event loop functionality, but sometimes when it has to process a large-sized CPU-driven task it will go down in speed tremendously. The event loop will utilize all its CPU capability to finish this single CPU-intensive task which leads to the slowing down of the event loop. This can then affect your overall application.
- Difficulty in maintaining code:
- Due to the asynchronous nature of Node, it can be a real issue maintaining code. Node primarily relies on callbacks, meaning that there can be a problem where callback hell arises. Callback hell is an issue that can be very difficult to troubleshoot as it basically means callbacks nested into callbacks into callbacks and so on.
- Lack of library support:
- With the npm libraries being open source, it is not surprising that coding standards and proper documentation aren’t available for it.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, Node is nowhere close to dying or falling off. It is very much in demand and a great skill to have in the current and near-future market. Businesses tend to go with this platform due to its impeccable speed and performance. Minor issues can be avoided with other external tools as well. So, if you want to outsource your project, then Node would be a great choice to do so!
Author Bio: Kapil Panchal – Technical Content Manager
A passionate Technical writer and an SEO freak working as a Technical content manager in a reputed Word Add-in development company. Having served in the Information technology, Services, and Product industry for years, I relish writing about technology and love sharing impeccable insights on various platforms. I believe in constant learning and am passionate about being better every day.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kapil-panchal-99122816a/
