Introduction to Node.js

Node.js is designed to build scalable network applications. Node.js runtime environment contains everything that you need to run a program written in Javascript.

What is Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine?

Node.js is JavaScript run time built on top of Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. V8 is Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript engine, written in C++ and used in Google Chrome, and in Node.js.

If you are from Java background, below analogy can help you.

Is Node.js support Asynchronous model?

Yes, Node.js is an asynchronous event driven JavaScript runtime.

Why Node.js?

a.   Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking IO model that makes it light weight, efficient and scalable.

b.   Node.js supports Non-blocking I/O. In case of blocking I/O, if user requests for 2 IO calls, second IO call will not start until first IO call is finishes. But in case of Non-Blocking I/O, both the I/O requests start parallelly.

In Node.js, all APIs are non-blocking.

c.   Node.js is open source, applications developed in node.js can run in different platforms like windows, linux and Mac OS.

d.   Node.js has a package manager called npm, it is used to access all the node.js libraries.

e.   Node.js is asynchronous and single threaded. All the events are recorded in event queue and handled in the order they were raised

What you should know?

a.   Since node.js is a JavaScript framework, you must know JavaScript to start with.

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