Of the many available web-application development platforms, why should you choose Node.js? There are many stacks to choose from; what is it about Node.js that makes it rise above the others? We will learn the answer to this in the following sections.
Popularity
Node.js is quickly becoming a popular development platform, and is being adopted by plenty of big and small players. One of these players is PayPal, who are replacing their incumbent Java-based system with one written in Node.js. Other large Node.js adopters include Walmart's online e-commerce platform, LinkedIn, and eBay.
According to NodeSource, Node.js usage is growing rapidly (for more information, visit https://nodesource.com/node-by-numbers). The evidence for this growth includes increasing bandwidth for downloading Node.js releases, increasing activity in Node.js-related GitHub projects, and more.
Interest in JavaScript itself remains very strong but has been at a plateau for years, measured in search volume (Google Insights) and its use as a programming skill (Dice Skills Center). Node.js interest has been growing rapidly, but is showing signs of plateauing.
It's best to not just follow the crowd because there are different crowds, and each one claims that their software platform does cool things. Node.js does some cool things, but what is more important is its technical merit.
JavaScript everywhere
Having the same programming language on the server and client has been a long-time dream on the web. This dream dates back to the early days of Java, where Java applets in the browser were to be the frontend to server applications written in Java, and JavaScript was originally envisioned as a lightweight scripting language for those applets. Java never fulfilled its hype as a client-side programming language, and even the phrase "Java Applets" is fading into a dim memory of the abandoned client-side application model. We ended up with JavaScript as the principle in-browser, client-side language, rather than Java. Typically, the frontend JavaScript developers were in a different language universe than the server-side team, which was likely to be coding in PHP, Java, Ruby, or Python.
Over time, in-browser JavaScript engines became incredibly powerful, letting us write ever-more-complex browser-side applications. With Node.js, we are finally able to implement applications with the same programming language on the client and server by having JavaScript at both ends of the web, in the browser and server.
A common language for frontend and backend offers several potential benefits:
- The same programming staff can work on both ends of the wire.
- Code can be migrated between the server and client more easily.
- Common data formats (JSON) between the server and client.
- Common software tools exist for the server and client.
- Common testing or quality-reporting tools for the server and client.
- When writing web applications, view templates can be used on both sides.
The JavaScript language is very popular because of its ubiquity in web browsers. It compares favorably with other languages while having many modern, advanced language concepts. Thanks to its popularity, there is a deep talent pool of experienced JavaScript programmers out there.
Leveraging Google's investment in V8
To make Chrome a popular and excellent web browser, Google invested in making V8 a super-fast JavaScript engine. Google, therefore, has a huge motivation to keep on improving V8. V8 is the JavaScript engine for Chrome, and it can also be executed in a standalone manner.
Node.js is built on top of the V8 JavaScript engine, letting it take advantage of all that work on V8. As a result, Node.js was able to quickly adopt new JavaScript language features as they were implemented by V8 and reap performance wins for the same reason.
Leaner, asynchronous, event-driven model
The Node.js architecture, built on a single execution thread, with an ingenious event-oriented, asynchronous-programming model, and a fast JavaScript engine, is claimed to have less overhead than thread-based architectures. Other systems using threads for concurrency tend to have memory overhead and complexity, which Node.js does not have. We'll get into this more later in the chapter.
Microservice architecture
A new sensation in software development is the idea of the microservice. Microservices are focused on splitting a large web application into small, tightly-focused services that can be easily developed by small teams. While they aren't exactly a new idea—they're more of a reframing of old client–server computing models—the microservice pattern fits well with agile project-management techniques, and gives us a more granular application deployment.
Node.js is an excellent platform for implementing microservices. We'll get into this later.
Node.js is stronger after a major schism and hostile fork
During 2014 and 2015, the Node.js community faced a major split over policy, direction, and control. The io.js project was a hostile fork driven by a group that wanted to incorporate several features and change who was in the decision-making process. The end result was a merge of the Node.js and io.js repositories, an independent Node.js foundation to run the show, and the community working together to move forward in a common direction.
A concrete result of healing that rift is the rapid adoption of new ECMAScript language features. The V8 engine is adopting these new features quickly to advance the state of web development. The Node.js team, in turn, is adopting these features as quickly as they show up in V8, meaning that promises and async functions are quickly becoming a reality for Node.js programmers.
The bottom line is that the Node.js community not only survived the io.js fork and the later ayo.js fork, but the community and the platform it nurtured grew stronger as a result.
In this section, you have learned several reasons to use Node.js. Not only is it a popular platform, with a strong community behind it, but there are also serious technical reasons to use it. Its architecture has some key technical benefits, so let's take a deeper look at these.
