Why you should choose Node.js for server application development

Node.JS is a technology that has transformed the familiar JavaScript to web developers from a client-side scripting language into a general-purpose language that has a large number of application options.

How does Node compare to other server-side scripting technologies?

Node.js is asynchronous. In addition to non-blocking I/O it allows a Node.js server application to serve many more client requests per unit of time than an application developed with most other server-side scripting technologies.

What does this mean for business?

• You can get your project up and running with relatively little money spent on server infrastructure.
• With the right architecture in place, it allows you to scale your business without investing a lot of money.

What does this mean for developers?

If there is no understanding of how asynchronous code works and no experience with it, it will be very difficult at first. It's hard to understand that some instruction written "upstream" may execute much later than subsequent ones, or may not execute at all. You'll need to study well the concepts of callbacks, promises, async-await wrappers over promises, synchronous and asynchronous generators, and iterators. But it is very good to structure thinking, allows you to look at the process of program execution in a different way and understand what a huge amount of time a "normal" - synchronous - program wastes in waiting periods, and learn how to save this time.

A good understanding of asynchronous approaches to development greatly increases the value of a specialist on the labor market and, accordingly, allows you to apply for a higher salary.

Node allows you to develop MVPs quickly. A large number of packages with different functionality have already been developed in Node. You can not waste time on developing basic functionality, but concentrate on business logic right away.

• The new product will be brought to market faster (TTM will decrease).
• Less money will be spent on the development process, as fewer developer hours will be needed to create the first version of the product.

The hypotheses generated by the initial market research will be tested more quickly, adjustments to the product will be made more quickly, and funds will ultimately be turned around more quickly. This is a very important characteristic for project investors.

What does it mean for developers?

You can not reinvent the "wheel" on each project, which inevitably causes a lot of mistakes and makes the work boring, and deal closely with the tasks that are important to the project.

More freedom in choosing an approach, building the architecture, modifying the standard functionality that does not meet the requirements of the architect and / or customer.

Node is based on JavaScript. As a consequence, it greatly increases the likelihood of developing full-stack specialists in the development team: frontenders who are good at the backend or backenders who are good at the frontend.

Node.js is very closely related to JavaScript, the syntax and architectural approaches are identical, only the "wrappers" (browser and server side) differ.

What does this mean for business?

The development team will have specialists with a broader view of the problem, which means a reduced burden on management.

The development process will be more efficient because it is always easier and faster for a person (a full-stack developer) to negotiate with himself than with another person. Thus, the cost of communication between specialists is reduced.

Fewer bugs will occur in the development process, because floating bugs often occur at the junction of different development technologies with different types of data.

What does this mean for developers?

If you have worked closely with the frontend before, there is a good understanding of the processes that occur with the data in the user part of the resource, and as a consequence, an easier dialogue with frontenders.

A good full-stack specialist is often more valued in the marketplace than a good backend or frontend developer

If you have enough time to develop a project, you can do both frontend and backend yourself, thus avoiding a huge number of "collisions" which often take a lot of time to resolve.

Of course, like any other technology Node has disadvantages.

What are the weak points of Node?

Node is very fast with a lot of lightweight queries (those that do not require long processing of data, complex calculations, etc.), but its performance is greatly impaired if the queries require large server resources.

Often the mentioned disadvantages are used by Node opponents to explain their reluctance to use it in production. Moreover, in confirmation of the first disadvantage, it is often stated that Node is single-threaded, so it is impossible to write serious applications on it. At the current stage of technology development this is completely wrong. First, there has long been an approach where multiple instances of the application are run and the Nginx web server is used as a load balancer. Second, modern versions of Node have a built-in ability to create clusters of single-threaded processes, as well as special utilities for load balancing, automatic restart of processes, memory usage control, etc.

The second disadvantage of Node is easy enough to compensate. First, do not use the "latest" version of the package, but specify the exact version of the package with which the system is guaranteed to be compatible. Second, to avoid losing access to the exact versions of packages in the public register, make copies of them in the local register. Thirdly, do not update the platform or package versions in the production environment without first testing this mapping in the development environment (an obvious statement, but one that is often ignored).

With the first disadvantage is a little more complicated, because we can't "overclock" Node in resource-intensive operations. But there is a solution - to transfer the operations that create a high hardware load to separate system components written not in Node, often even located on separate physical or virtual machines. There are various options for implementing this solution: microservice architecture, connecting modules written in other programming languages, etc.

Source: CLLAX - Software Reviews