Most people start their business small, but of course, they have to scale business operations at some point in time. Hence, you must choose the right technology to build your business. One such technology that has been trending is Node.js. Now, most businesses prefer to have it for web app development. The world’s biggest companies like Amazon, Microsoft, PayPal have adopted it over the years.
As a business owner, you must be wondering what is so special about Node.js. Well, there are many reasons for it. In this article, we will understand Node.js and talk about multiple reasons why it is the best option for businesses to build their platform.
What is Node.js?
Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform runtime environment used for developing server-side web applications based on JavaScript. Using the programming for both server-side and client-side scripts, Node.js creates a consistent JavaScript development environment. It removes the need to use different programming languages for scripting on different sides.
The Node.js framework was created in 2009 by Ryan Dahl. In his opinion, software should be able to handle several simultaneous connections, and the best way to achieve that is through a single-threaded event loop and non-blocking I/Os. Consequently, Node became very efficient, and requests were no longer delayed.
Here are the usage statistics that prove that Node.js is here to stay and dominate:
- As of the beginning of 2020, more than 50% of the developers were using Node.js in their work.
- Across the United States, more than 28000 websites are built on Node.js technology.
- At least 20 million websites use Node.js as it reduces development cost by 58%.
- 43% of Node.Js developers use it for enterprise app development.
- 49.9% of professional developers are using Node.js for its Frameworks, libraries and tools.
Reasons why Node.js development is best for Businesses
1. Scalability is easy –
As the business grows, scalability becomes an issue for most businesses. However, businesses that use Node.js face no such issue. It is a lightweight, open-source framework designed so that applications can be scaled. Due to this functionality, Uber uses Node.js in its application.
As you know, the demand for cabs increases during a specific time of the day and during the holiday season. Since the platform is built on Node.js, Uber never faces any issues.
2. High Performance –
Today, customers do not like to revisit a platform if the performance of the platform is slow. Your platform should give high performance if you want to ensure your customers keep coming back to your site. You can achieve it using Node.js. It can accelerate any framework as it compiles JavaScript to native machine code that runs on Google’s V8 engines quickly.
The performance is always up-to-date since both Node and V8 are updated regularly – security patches, performance boosters, and you get support for modern JavaScript features. PayPal has mentioned that they were able to reduce the response time by 35% using Node.js. Also, they were able to handle more than doubled requests per second after switching to Node.js.
3. Real-time Apps –
Many owners today want to create real-time apps. If you want to create gaming or chat apps, Node.js is the right choice. It supports multi-user real-time web projects. The multi-use functionality is handled by the event loop utilizing the WebSocket protocol based on TCP. The efforts required to create a real-time app using Node.js are equivalent to creating a blogging app using PHP.
4. Proxy services –
One of Node.js’ important capabilities is that it can serve as a proxy server for services that have varying response times or collect data from multiple sources. Let us try to understand it better. As a company, your platform has to interact with third-party resources, store images and videos on third-party cloud services, and collect data from various sources. All these events have different response times. However, when you use Node.js you can easily manage these challenges.
5. Easy to use –
You don’t have to hire expensive developers to build your application. Also, developers don’t have to spend too much time building a stand function. Node.js has Node Package Manager (NPM) which is an online database of private (paid-for) and public packages.
Developers can get the packages and save a lot of time and effort. There are some common activities that most applications need like uploading files, template systems, managing real-time communication with users, etc. Developers can easily find packages for these in the Node.js library.
6. Community support –
Businesses lose both time and money when the developers are stuck at some issue for a long time. However, when you use Node.js, the chances of it reduces drastically. There are thousands of Node.js developers in the community and the chances of someone already facing an issue and asking the question in the forum and also addressed by someone else are high.
7. Data Streaming –
One of Node.js’ important capabilities is that it can serve as a proxy server for services that have varying response times or collect data from multiple sources. Let us try to understand it better. As a company, your platform has to interact with third-party resources, store images and videos on third-party cloud services, and collect data from various sources.
All these events have different response times. However, when you use Node.js you can easily manage these challenges.
8. SEO-friendly –
In most cases, you think about the SEO once the website is ready, and then you realize there are many things you need to redo to make your website SEO-friendly. However, you don’t have to put in extra effort when using Node.js. It comes with built-in features or prepackaged code that works with search algorithms.
9. Advanced Caching –
Last on the list, but if you ask any Node.js developer, they will put it right on the top of their list. You can register a simple form on your application. Node.js eliminates the need to rerun the code the first time the server calls the module. Using the cache speeds up the loading of web pages and improves the user experience.
Conclusion
We have covered only some of the points that make Node.js superior to its peers. If you are required to develop a real-time app, you should definitely consider Node.js. It is becoming really popular, and some of the biggest companies in the world are using it. If you haven’t used it as of now, it is the right time to start using it.
