We are finishing our series of articles on the best open source projects for web development. If you haven’t seen our past articles about Vue, React, Angular, Node.js – they’re strongly recommended.

Here’s what this last one is about: projects we included in our collection, criteria we grouped them by, and how to choose an open source project in order to make a contribution to it.

Note that under open source projects we assume the following:

• Node.js frameworks;
• Tools which can be used in Node.js;
• Node.js server applications;
• Fullstack applications (Vue, React, Angular etc. on the front-end and Node.js on backend) which use Node.js on the server side

What is Node.js?

Node.js is a cross-platform, open source runtime environment for executing JavaScript code outside of the browser. It is event-driven and works on a non-blocking I/O model, making it lightweight and efficient for building web applications. Node.js is just another way to run code on your computer, being just the environment for running JavaScript.

With Node.js, you can run your code simultaneously on both the client and the server side, speeding up the whole process of development. Node.js’ rising popularity has also produced a wave of open source projects and tools to help developers work with the environment.

Pros and Cons of Node.js

Pros

• Uses JavaScript, which is easy to learn;
• Shares the same codebase with both server and client side;
• It has seamless JSON support;
• Node.js has active community, with lots of code examples.

Cons

• It is very to hard to deal with relational databases when you use Node.js;
• Callback hell;
• Performance bottlenecks with heavy computation tasks.

Reasons to use Node.js in projects

• You can build very fast useful tools like chats, fileuploads etc;
• Non-blocking code. This approach helps the application not to pause or sleep, but to become available for other requests;
• Fast processing. Node uses V8 JavaScript Runtime engine, the one which Google Chrome uses, and – believe us – it is very fast;
• One environment;
• A great number of tools that can help in everyday development – CMS, chats, spreadsheets, form validation and other libraries;
• Larger community that can provide support for free or on a commercial basis.

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