Node.js makes it possible!
How Node.js Opened the Door to Building Real Backend Systems with JavaScript
Mir Tauhidul Islam
Nowadays, Node.js is a familiar term related to the server. A large number of community works with it and for its development. There are many definitions of Node.js available on the web. In the short term, it’s a JavaScript runtime environment that actually works outside the browser.
Before going to Node, we have to know about some other terms. Firstly, about the most powerful client-side scripting language or web browser language, JavaScript was developed in 1995 by a Netscape programmer, Brendan Eich. From the beginning, the JavaScript programming language was working on front-end development as a major part with HTML and CSS (HTML and CSS are not programming language they are markup languages for web development). Though every language has a different compiler or interpreter to convert their code into machine language which is readable by machines JavaScript has also and it’s called JavaScript engine. JavaScript engine compiles or interprets JavaScript programs into machine language or code. Besides, different web browsers have different JavaScript engines, and the V8 engine is the most powerful JavaScript engine developed by Google, which is mainly used in the Google Chrome web browser. Faster and direct compiling to machine language makes V8 more powerful than other JavaScript engines.
After some days of initial release, new thinking comes to the JavaScript community. Should their work scope will be limited only to frontend development, where other languages like java, python, c++ working on everywhere, but JavaScript is only on the browser. Then some of them were thinking if JavaScript works on the server, how nice it will be. Then they started working to expand it, and after that, Node.js was invented and first released by an American software engineer, Ryan Dahl, in 2009.
Actually, Node.js is not a language nor a framework, it’s a runtime environment where we can run JavaScript programs in machines on physical machines for the first time ever, like other languages. Then JavaScript started becoming more famous as it is no more front-end tool only, it has now already become a backend tool also. As Node.js has a built-in installed HTTP module so it can transfer data through hypertext transfer protocol. So JavaScript started using from the client-side to the server-side, frontend to backend everywhere, which means it becomes a full-stack tool. After that, new JavaScript frameworks like React and Angular add an extra value to the JavaScript portfolio.
After some time, a new problem arises that every programming language has individual frameworks to develop web application but JavaScript doesn’t have any,and then Express.js was developed for the first time. Then JavaScript becomes a full package as it has React.js and Angular.js for frontend, Node.js for backend, Express.js for web application development, and MongoDB for the database. Then, suddenly two terms developed called MERN, which stands for Mongo, Express, React and Node, on the other hand, MEAN stands for Mongo, Express, Angular, and Node. These are the two full packages of web application development. Now we can build an entire application with one language, JavaScript, the so famous and powerful JavaScript, which already become one of the top programming languages.
Besides, node.js has many powerful features like NPM (Node Package Manager), which gives all the modules all the packages to node.js. A huge database of modules made it more powerful and vast. That’s why Node.js is so famous in the developer community.
Finally, if we go to technical terms, we have to say Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment that uses the v8 JavaScript engine. Node.js is single-threaded, non-blocking, asynchronously programming, which is very memory efficient and powerful. It’s an open-source server environment. It’s free for developers. Node.js runs on various platforms like Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS, etc.