JavaScript is one of the most popular software development technologies and globally used by the developer in front end development.

JavaScript traditionally used as a web frontend development tool, now it has also become a major cross-platform mobile development tool as a basic technology for a large number of platforms, such as Apache Cordova/PhoneGap, React Native, NativeScript, Appcelerator Titanium.

But the use of javascript not limited here. Lately, there has been a lot of buzz around the use of JavaScript for server-side programming. One of the tools that indicated this shift in web development was Node.js.

What is Node.js?

Node.js is actually not a framework or a library, but a runtime environment, based on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine.

It was firstly introduced in 2009 by Ryan Dahl at the annual European JSConf after that it was recognized as “the most exciting single piece of software in the current JavaScript universe”.

The technology was later adopted by a number of technology leaders, such as Uber, eBay, Walmart, and Netflix, to name a few. This technology gets people interest globally and  picked in 2017 as per google trends

The Benefits of Node.js

Using Node.js for backend, you automatically get all the pros of full stack JavaScript development, such as:

• better efficiency and overall developer productivity
• code sharing and reuse
• speed and performance
• easy knowledge sharing within a team
• a huge number of free tools

As javascript is widely and known for fast processing, developers trained in frontend JavaScript can start programming the server side with minimum effort.  With the same language on both sides, you can reuse code on the frontend and the backend by wrapping it into modules and creating new levels of abstraction.

Fast-processing and event-based model

Node.js is fast; it is not a myth. Take a look at the performance tests by toptal.com, comparing how GO, PHP, Java, and Node.js handle concurrent requests. There a couple of reasons for Node.js showing such results:

V8 engine. The engine used in Node.js implementation was originally developed for the Chrome browser. Written in C++, Chrome’s V8 is used to compile functions written in JavaScript into machine code, and it does the job at an impressive speed. Just check performance benchmarks in V8’s blog. Thanks to Google investing heavily in its engine, V8 demonstrates performance improvements every year, and Node.js extracts the whole bag of benefits out of it.

The Drawbacks of Node.js

Θ Performance bottlenecks with heavy computation tasks

The biggest drawback of Node.js even now is its inability to process CPU bound tasks. But, to understand what the roots of this issue are, we need a little bit of context. Let’s begin with the basics, with JavaScript itself.

As we know, Node.js is a runtime environment that executes JavaScript on the server side. Being a frontend programming language, JavaScript uses a single thread to process tasks quickly. Threading is not required for it to work, because tasks in JavaScript are lightweight and take little CPU.

Callback hell issue

Due to its asynchronous nature, Node.js relies heavily on callbacks, the functions that run after each task in the queue is finished. Keeping a number of queued tasks in the background, each with its callback, might result in the so-called callback hell, which directly impacts the quality of code. Simply put, it’s a “situation where callbacks are nested within other callbacks several levels deep, potentially making it difficult to understand and maintain the code.”

Thus, with millions of JavaScript developers out there, it might be hard to find a skilled Node.js professional for your project. In this case, you certainly don’t want to limit your search to only one country. Sourcing technical talent overseas has long become the norm in the IT industry.

Mactosys have rich experience in node js development