Node.js is easily one of the biggest sweethearts of backend development. Its popularity around the world is constantly growing, especially in the USA with its start-up kingdom, Silicon Valley. It’s no wonder that over 175,398 websites (some of them being THE biggest players on the market) already put Node.js on their backend. In this article, I’ll check out the benefits of Node.js, present massive corporations and well-known companies that use this framework in their web and answer a burning question – why use Node.js in your software project? Hey, ho, let’s go!

What is Node.js?

The Node.js platform is a server-side runtime environment based on JavaScript.

It simply means that you can use JavaScript for backend development.

Which is good news because now developers are able to use the same solution for both frontend and backend of web applications they work on. We’ll talk more about what is Node.js used for later.

Node.js was created in 2009 by Ryan Dahl. By the end of the year, it premiered at European JSConf. Node.js combined Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, an event loop, and a low-level I/O API. In the beginning, it was only available on Linux and Mac OS, however, the Windows version was introduced three years later.

What started small, is now an open-source with MIT licence, supported by a massive community and hundreds of add-ons. According to Stack Overflow 2019 survey, Node.js is now the most popular tool in “Frameworks, Libraries, and Tools” category with 50% of answers!

via Stack Overflow 2019 survey

Node.js services are getting more and more popular, hence why they get a brand new release at least twice a year. The current Long Term Support Node.js 14 version will be available until April 2023. We’ve already described the new Node.js 14 features on our blog, so if you’re interested, make sure to give this article a read.

#node.js #applications #javascript