Why Node JS? 7 Reasons Famous Companies Choose It

Introduction

Corporate organizations across the world are choosing Node JS to build their game-changing applications. From PayPal to Trello, Walmart and even NASA, it seems that Node JS has something to offer to everyone.

The question we want to answer is: why Node JS? Let’s investigate why big companies from various business sectors find it suitable.

Let’s get into details.

Why Node JS is a good choice for large organizations?

1. It allows us to use JavaScript as a backend language

While there have been many JavaScript frameworks over the years, it was always assumed that JavaScript and backend development don’t go together. That is until Node JS arrived in 2009 and showed everyone that JavaScript could compete with well-established programming languages.

What’s crucial here:

<span class="colorbox1" fs-test-element="box1"><p>Node JS allows developers for executing JavaScript code outside of a browser. Backend and frontend of our app can be written in JavaScript. That enables developers to share some code and allows one team to work on the whole application.</p></span>

2. It’s cross-platform

Node JS is cross-platform, which means that corporate organizations can easily target all major platforms, including Windows, Linux, and macOS, all with one code base.

3. It’s lightweight

Node JS uses an asynchronous event-driven I/O model, ensuring that almost no function in Node directly performs I/O. That makes it lightweight and efficient.

4. V8 makes it fast

To fully understand why Node JS has become a standard for corporate organizations, you need to be familiar with Google Chrome’s V8 runtime, upon which Node JS is built.

Developed by the Chromium Project for Google Chrome and Chromium web browsers, Google Chrome’s V8 runtime, commonly called Chrome V8 or even just V8, is an open-source JavaScript engine written in C++.

<span class="colorbox1" fs-test-element="box1"><p>Because it compiles JavaScript directly to native machine code before executing it and deploys various optimization techniques, V8 makes Node JS applications very fast. </p></span>

The high-performance nature of V8 is further emphasized by Google’s continuous effort to improve it. When LinkedIn migrated from Ruby on Rails to Node JS, the professional social network quickly noticed that its mobile app became two to ten times faster and more lightweight.

5. It simplifies developers’ work

<blockquote>The simple truth is Node JS has reinvented the way we create websites. Developers build critical functionality in days, not weeks.</br>– Ramin Beheshti, the Chief Product Officer & Technology Officer at Dow Jones<br></blockquote>

With Node JS, software developers don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel because they can simply download common features in the form of smaller open-source software modules using the Node Package Manager, known as npm.

Essentially, npm is an online database of public and paid-for private packages, and it comes included by default with every installation of Node JS. If you’re familiar with Ruby Gems, npm modules will feel instantly familiar to you.

For example, mongodb and mongojs are MongoDB wrappers that provide the API for MongoDB object databases. moment.js is a library for parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates. pug is a popular templating engine and connect is an extensible HTTP server framework that allows software developers to glue together various middleware services to handle requests.

<span class="colorbox1" fs-test-element="box1"><p>Thanks to these and many other modules, software developers can create highly capable applications much faster than they could otherwise.</p></span>

6. It’s designed with scalability in mind

Node JS isn’t more scalable than PHP or Ruby. But it is way easier to scale than other backend technologies. It’s a huge advantage for organizations allowing grow and scale their product easily.

7. It offers stability and long-term support

While software developers, including Node JS developers, are used to things constantly changing, with new technologies replacing old ones, corporate organizations seek stability and long-term support.

With stakeholders to please and customers to serve, they can’t afford to blindly follow the hype and adopt every new technology that comes along, hoping it can survive past the stage of infancy and deliver on its promises.

<span class="colorbox1" fs-test-element="box1"><p>Node JS has detailed long term support (LTS) policy that clarifies release schedules and specifies exactly how long a given version will be supported for critical fixes. </p></span>

According to the 2018 Node JS User Survey Report, the third annual Node JS report by the Node JS Foundation, LTS support is seen as an important feature by up to 70 percent of Node JS developers, which is a significant number that largely explains why Node JS has become a standard for corporate organizations.

Why Node Js? Conclusion

There is no single reason why Node JS has become a standard for corporate organizations. Its immense success can be attributed to a plethora of different factors, starting with the popularity of JavaScript and ending with its stability and long-term support, both of which are rare in the current era of ever-changing technologies and constant disruption.

<span class="colorbox1" fs-test-element="box1"><p>In time, Node JS could very well become the default go-to technology for all corporate organizations that are interested in developing high-intensity, real-time applications capable of meeting the needs of modern users.</p></span>