JavaScript is quite a mature programming language, lots of programmers use this language for developing the backend. In the past backend development was a tough job for programmers, usually, they have to do lots of configuration to set up the environment for running the application on the server. If something goes wrong with the environment then the whole application crashes and all the effort of programmers go to waste. To prevent this, a programmer named Ryan Dahl created a server environment for javascript developers called Node.js in 2009.
Node.js is an open-source server environment and it allows programmers to run JavaScript on the server which means programmers can build applications using javascript and easily run it on the server without wasting time on creating an environment from scratch.
Pros
- You can stream big files.
- It uses JavaScript, which is easy to learn
- It provides you with asynchronous, event-driven I/O APIs.
- Share the same piece of code with both the server and client-side.
- An active and vibrant community, with lots of code, shared via GitHub, etc.
- NPM, the Node packaged modules have already become huge and still growing.
Cons
- Dealing with relational databases is a pain if you are using only Node.
- It does not have a Strong Library Support System so you have to use third part libraries.
- Node.js doesn't provide scalability. One CPU is not going to be enough; the platform provides no ability to scale out to take advantage of the multiple cores commonly present in today's server-class hardware.
Learning Node.js is easy and can get you many job opportunities because it is very popular and used by so many tech giants like GoDaddy, Groupon, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix, PayPal, Rakuten, SAP, Voxer, Walmart, Yahoo! and Amazon Web Services.
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