What is Node.JS and Why Should I Care?

featured-nodeJavaScript is a just a client-side programming language that runs in the browser, right? Not any more. Node.js is a way of running JavaScript on the server; but it’s so much more as well. If you’re at all interested in web development, you really should find out a little about Node and why it’s making waves in the community.

Node is an interface to the V8 JavaScript runtime – the super-fast JavaScript interpreter that runs in the Chrome browser. As it happens, you can also download V8 and embed it into anything; Node does that, for web servers. JavaScript is after all, just a language – there’s nothing that says it couldn’t be used on a server as well as in the user’s browser. In a typical LAMP server stack, you have an underlying Apache or NGINX web server, with PHP running on top of it. Each new connection to the server spawns a new thread, and it’s very easy to quickly lose performance or for a site to “go down” – the only way to support more users being to add more servers. It simply doesn’t scale well. With Node, this isn’t the case. There is no Apache to listen for incoming connections and return HTTP status codes – you’ll need to handle that core server architecture yourself. Luckily, there’s modules to make this easier, but it can still be a little overwhelming when you start out. The result, however, is a high performance web application.