It is very important for enterprises these days to have web applications that are flexible, fast as well as safe. Having these applications can help them compete better with other businesses in their respective industries. Right from the time, it came into existence, Node.js has been seen as the ideal choice for enterprise app development. It is because of this reason that the likes of Uber, Microsoft, Yahoo, and LinkedIn adopted it, and that too at a time when it wasn’t as popular as it is now.
There are several different purposes that enterprise apps serve. Those are completely different from the purposes that business or customer-facing applications are supposed to serve. Some of these purposes include tracking the performance of employees, monitoring business performance, storing business-specific data, and bringing employees on the same platform amongst others. One that we can confidently say is that Node.js has completely changed the way that enterprise app development was seen before. Many app developers with full-stack development capabilities use it to build enterprise apps. In this post, we will take a look at what Node.js exactly is and how Node.js development services can help enterprises build applications that serve the purposes that we have mentioned above.
What is Node.js?
In simple words, Node.js is a JavaScript run-time environment that is used to run JavaScript outside the browser. It is used by developers across the world to write server-side scripts and command-line tools. In other words, it is used to develop dynamic web pages before those appear on the web browsers of users by executing scripts on the server-side.
It creates a uniform JavaScript development environment by using the programming for both client-side and server-side scripts. It does away with the need of having to use different programming languages for scripts on different sides. Node.js is special in its own right. It has done away with an old way of approaching development that relied on a stateless request-response and web. It has brought us into the world of real-time applications that are connected to both the client-side as well as server-side. This allows the easy exchange of data and communication between the two sides. Earlier, it used to be different – the communication was initiated only by the client.
Node.js was released for use in the year 2009 and sponsored by Joyent, a cloud computing and hosting solutions company. The company was already popular back then due to its association with Ruby on Rails. It was a hosting services provider to Twitter and LinkedIn around the same time. Also, Node.js was first used by LinkedIn for its mobile app’s backend development. Node.js has come a long way since then.
Why Enterprises Choose Node.js?
There are different reasons why businesses use any programming language for enterprise app development. However, the reasons for choosing Node.js are a little different. Most importantly, it helps in building full-scale apps. What makes it stand tall amongst the crowd are the futuristic tool kit that it comes with and how it helps businesses in building complex applications.
One of the biggest reasons why Node.js is so widely used in enterprise app development is because it helps in building cross-platform apps for desktop users. The codes for building web apps can be reused for desktop apps for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Also, developers that develop web apps can work on desktop apps without being required to acquire additional skills, such as Objective-C, C#, and other such languages.
It is very easy for developers to use Node.js to access developer tools for different browsers like Google Chrome. This helps developers to not only debug in a better way but also be more efficient while creating desktop apps out of the same code that was used for client-side web apps. Also, most of the tools available to Node.js developers are cross-platform tools. This does away with the need for a Mac or Windows machine for creating their respective desktop apps.
Conclusion
The performance and scalability of enterprise apps built using Node.js are remarkable, to say the least. What’s more, it follows the microservice pattern. This helps enterprises to deal with a lot more situations and interruptions that can hamper efficiency. When businesses grow, they have to deal with the growing demands of the market too. One of the steps that can help them do that is web app development and management. Properly handling every aspect of web development becomes a necessity. Node.js helps enterprises manage the smallest of tasks associated with web development – email marketing, reporting, CMS, deployment, and a lot more.
These are just a few of the many reasons why Node.js is so popular when it comes to enterprise app development.
