Official_Node.js -- introduction

Introduction to Node.js

Introduction to Node.js

Node.js is an open-source and cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment. It is a popular tool for almost any kind of project!

Node.js runs the V8 JavaScript engine, the core of Google Chrome, outside of the browser. This allows Node.js to be very performant.

A Node.js app runs in 1️⃣ a single process, without creating a new thread for every request.

Node.js provides a set of asynchronous I/O primitives in its standard library that 2️⃣ prevent JavaScript code from blocking

generally, libraries in Node.js are written using non-blocking paradigms, making blocking behavior the exception rather than the norm.

When Node.js performs an I/O operation, like reading from the network, accessing a database or the filesystem, instead of blocking the thread and wasting CPU cycles waiting, Node.js will 3️⃣ resume the operations when the response comes back.

This allows Node.js to handle thousands of 4️⃣ concurrent connections with a single server without introducing the burden of managing thread concurrency, which could be a significant source of bugs.

Node.js has a unique advantage because millions of frontend developers that write JavaScript for the browser are now able to write the server-side code in addition to the client-side code without the need to learn a completely different language.

In Node.js the new ECMAScript standards can be used without problems, as you don’t have to wait for all your users to update their browsers - you are in charge of deciding which ECMAScript version to use by changing the Node.js version, and you can also enable specific experimental features by running Node.js with flags.

An Example Node.js Application

The most common example Hello World of Node.js is a web server:

const http = require('http')

const hostname = '127.0.0.1'
const port = 998

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
   
    res.statusCode = 200
    res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain')
    res.end('Hello World!\n')
})

server.listen(port, hostname, () => {
   
    console.log(`Server running at http://${
     hostname}:${
     port}/`)
})

This code first includes the Node.js http module

Node.js has a fantastic standard library, including first-class support for networking.

The createServer() method of http 🥅 ​ creates a new HTTP server and returns it.

The server is set to listen on the specified port and host name. When the server is ready, the callback function is called, in this case informing us that the server is running.

Whenever a new request is received, the request event is called, providing two objects: a request (an http.IncomingMessage object) and a response (an http.ServerResponse object).

Those 2 objects are essential to handle the HTTP call.

The first provides the request details. In this simple example, this is not used, but you could access the request headers and request data.

The second is used to return data to the caller.

In this case with:

res.statusCode = 200

we set the statusCode property to 200, to indicate a successful response.

We set the Content-Type header:

res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain')

and we close the response, adding the content as an argument to end():

res.end('Hello World\n')

A brief history of Node.js

JavaScript is a programming language that was created at Netscape as a scripting tool to manipulate web pages inside their browser, Netscape Navigator.

Part of the business model of Netscape was to sell Web Servers, which included an environment called Netscape LiveWire that could 👯 create dynamic pages using server-side JavaScript. Unfortunately, Netscape LiveWire wasn’t very successful and server-side JavaScript wasn’t popularized until recently, by the introduction of Node.js.

One key factor that led to the rise of Node.js was the timing. Just a few years earlier, JavaScript had started to be considered as a more serious language, thanks to “Web 2.0” applications (such as Flickr, Gmail, etc.) that showed the world what a modern experience on the web could be like.

JavaScript engines also became considerably better as many browsers competed to offer users the best performance. Development teams behind major browsers worked hard to offer better support for JavaScript and find ways to ⭐️ make JavaScript run faster. The engine that Node.js uses under the hood, V8 (also known as Chrome V8 for being the open-source JavaScript engine of The Chromium Project), improved significantly due to this competition.

Node.js happened to be built in the right place and right time, but luck isn’t the only reason why it is popular today. It introduces a lot of innovative thinking and approaches for JavaScript server-side development that have already helped many developers.

2009

• Node.js is born
• The first form of npm is created

2010

• Express is born
• Socket.io is born

2011

• npm hits version 1.0
• Larger companies start adopting Node.js: LinkedIn, Uber, etc.
• hapi is born

2012

• Adoption continues very rapidly

2013

• First big blogging platform using Node.js: Ghost
• Koa is born

2014

• The Big Fork: io.js is a major fork of Node.js, with the goal of introducing ES6 support and moving faster

2015

• The Node.js Foundation is born
• IO.js is merged back into Node.js
• npm introduces private modules
• Node.js 4 (versions 1, 2 and 3 never previously released)

2016

• The leftpad incident
• Yarn is born
• Node.js 6

2017

• npm focuses more on security
• Node.js 8
• HTTP/2
• V8 introduces Node.js in its testing suite, officially making Node.js a target for the JS engine, in addition to Chrome
• 3 billion npm downloads every week

2018

• Node.js 10
• ES modules .mjs experimental support
• Node.js 11

2019

• Node.js 12
• Node.js 13

2020

• Node.js 14
• Node.js 15

2021

• Node.js 16

nvm is a popular way to run Node.js. It allows you to easily switch the Node.js version, and install new versions to try and easily rollback if something breaks, for example.

Differences between Node.js and the Browser

Both the browser and Node.js use JavaScript as their programming language.

Building apps that run in the browser is a completely different thing than building a Node.js application.

Despite the fact that it’s always JavaScript, there are some key differences that make the experience radically different.

From the perspective of a frontend developer who extensively uses JavaScript, Node.js apps bring with them a huge advantage

1️⃣ the comfort of programming everything - the frontend and the backend - in a single language.

You have a huge opportunity because we know how hard it is to fully, deeply learn a programming language, and by using the same language to perform all your work on the web - both on the client and on the server, you’re in a unique position of advantage.

What changes is the ecosystem.

In the browser, most of the time what you are doing is interacting with the DOM, or other Web Platform APIs like Cookies. Those do not exist in Node.js, of course. You don’t have the document, window and all the other objects that are provided by the browser.

And in the browser, we don’t have all the 2️⃣nice APIs that Node.js provides through its modules, like the filesystem access functionality.

Another big difference is that in Node.js you 3️⃣ control the environment. Unless you are building an open source application that anyone can deploy anywhere, you know which version of Node.js you will run the application on. Compared to the browser environment, where you don’t get the luxury to choose what browser your visitors will use, this is very convenient.

This means that you can write all the modern ES6-7-8-9 JavaScript that your Node.js version supports.

Since JavaScript moves so fast, but browsers can be a bit slow to upgrade, sometimes on the web you are stuck with using older JavaScript / ECMAScript releases.

You can use Babel to transform your code to be ES5-compatible before shipping it to the browser, but in Node.js, you won’t need that.

Another difference is that Node.js 4️⃣ uses the CommonJS module system, while in the browser we are starting to see the ES Modules standard being implemented.

In practice, this means that for the time being you use require() in Node.js and import in the browser.

The V8 JavaScript Engine

V8 is the name of the JavaScript engine that powers Google Chrome. It’s the thing that takes our JavaScript and executes it while browsing with Chrome.

V8 provides the runtime environment in which JavaScript executes. The DOM, and the other Web Platform APIs are provided by the browser.

The cool thing is that the JavaScript engine is 👦 independent of the browser in which it’s hosted. This key feature enabled the rise of Node.js. V8 was chosen to be the engine that powered Node.js back in 2009, and as the popularity of Node.js exploded, V8 became the engine that now powers an incredible amount of server-side code written in JavaScript.

The Node.js ecosystem is huge and thanks to V8 which also powers desktop apps, with projects like Electron.

The quest for performance

V8 is written in C++, and it’s continuously improved. It is portable and runs on Mac, Windows, Linux and several other systems.

In this V8 introduction, we will ignore the implementation details of V8: they can be found on more authoritative sites (e.g. the V8 official site), and they change over time, often radically.

V8 is always evolving, just like the other JavaScript engines around, to speed up the Web and the Node.js ecosystem.

On the web, there is a race for performance that’s been going on for years, and we (as users and developers) benefit a lot from this competition because we 👊 get faster and more optimized machines year after year.

Compilation

JavaScript is generally considered an interpreted language, but modern JavaScript engines no longer just interpret JavaScript, they compile it.

This has been happening since 2009, when the SpiderMonkey JavaScript compiler was added to Firefox 3.5, and everyone followed this idea.

JavaScript is internally compiled by V8 with 🕛 just-in-time (JIT) compilation to speed up the execution.

This might seem counter-intuitive, but since the introduction of Google Maps in 2004, JavaScript has evolved from a language that was generally executing a few dozens of lines of code to complete applications with thousands to hundreds of thousands of lines running in the browser.

Our applications now can run for hours inside a browser, rather than being just a few form validation rules or simple