Node JS basics.
Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment.
Nowadays we can do much more with JavaScript than just making websites interactive. JavaScript now has the capability to do things that other scripting languages like Ruby or Python can do.
Node. js is primarily used for non-blocking, event-driven servers, due to its single-threaded nature. It’s used for traditional websites and back-end API services but was designed with real-time, push-based architectures in mind.
Its package ecosystem, npm, is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world.
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.
const http = require('http');
const hostname = '127.0.0.1';
const port = 3000;
const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
res.statusCode = 200;
res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain');
res.end('Hello World');
});
server.listen(port, hostname, () => {
console.log(`Server running at http://${hostname}:${port}/`);
});Node.js is similar in design to and influenced by, systems like Ruby and Python. Node.js takes the event model a bit further. It presents an event loop as a runtime construct instead of as a library. In other systems, there is always a blocking call to start the event-loop.
The event loop is what allows Node.js to perform non-blocking I/O operations — despite the fact that JavaScript is single-threaded.
Whenever an async function is called, it is sent to a browser API. These are APIs built into the browser. Based on the command received from the call stack, the API starts its own single-threaded operation.
An example of this is the setTimeout method. When a setTimeout operation is processed in the stack, it is sent to the corresponding API which waits till the specified time to send this operation back in for processing.
The event loop facilitates this process; it constantly checks whether or not the call stack is empty. If it is empty, new functions are added from the event queue. If it is not, then the current function call is processed.
When discussing Node.js, one thing that definitely should not be omitted is built-in support for package management using NPM, a tool that comes by default with every Node.js installation. The idea of NPM modules is quite similar to that of Ruby Gems: a set of publicly available, reusable components, available through easy installation via an online repository, with version and dependency management.
Node.js was never created to solve the compute scaling problem. It was created to solve the I/O scaling problem.
If your use case does not contain CPU-intensive operations nor access any blocking resources, you can exploit the benefits of Node.js and enjoy fast and scalable network applications.