Introduction to NodeJS

Node.js is a free and open-source server environment. Node.js is very popular in recent times and a large number of companies like Microsoft, Paypal, Uber, Yahoo, General Electric and many others are using Node.js.

Key features

• Built on Google chrome's javascript engine V8 and is pretty fast.
• Node.js was developed by Ryan Dahl in 2009.
• Server-side platform for building fast and scalable applications.
• Node.js is Asynchronous, event-driven and works on single-thread model thus eliminating the dis-advantages of multi-thread model.
• Supports various platforms like Windows, Linux, MacOS etc.
• Provides rich library of java script modules which simplifies the development efforts.
• Released under MIT license.

Limitations of Multi-thread paradigm

1. Each request is handled by a seperate thread. If there are millions of requests, millions of threads are created, which is difficult to handle or it's very costly to accomodate millions of requests.
2. Lock on shared resources, other threads have to wait until a thread using the shared resource gets complete and hence it's very time consuming.

Advantages of Node.js

Below are the few notable advantages of NodeJS.

1. Highly scalable
2. High performance as it is built on Google chrome's V8.
3. easy to learn and only because of NodeJS, JS is referred as Full-stack JS as both server and client side can be written in JS itself. Thus saves a lot of time and money.
4. Asynchronous.

Where Node.js is not advisable

Node.js is not advisable for CPU intensive applications.