Node.js has established itself as the most dependable solution for the back-end of most apps. Learn about Node.js apps created by the world’s largest companies. In addition to that, we will also talk about the different types of applications that can be built with Node.js
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What is Node.js?
Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment that is built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. It’s a quick, light, scalable, and productive environment. Node is designed to create scalable network applications. Moreover, npm, the package ecosystem for Node.js, is the world’s largest open source library ecosystem.
Whether you’re unsure if Node.js is right for your project or simply want to view some popular Node.js apps, we hope you’ll be inspired after reading this article.
Why use Node.js for microservices architecture?
Native Node.js frameworks, such as Koa and Express, allow you to build highly adaptable microservices modules.
Node.js incorporates microservices in their own containers in a tidy, well-differentiated manner when used with Docker. As a result, there’s a slim risk that microservices will interfere with one another’s functionality.
Node.js is extremely lightweight and uses very few resources. As a result, using Node.js to create microservices makes applications more efficient and deployable.
A huge number of business giants have adopted Node.js application development due to its superior capabilities and low resource needs.
Node.js Apps
1. Netflix
The global favoured video streaming app first employed Node.js to facilitate high-volume web streaming for its 182 million members. Netflix wanted to provide observability (metrics), debuggability (diagnostic tools), and availability (service registration) in this early architecture.
The infrastructure that resulted was known as NodeQuark.
The NodeQuark service authenticates and routes requests to an application gateway, which then talks with APIs and prepares responses before sending them back to the client. Netflix has established a managed experience with NodeQuark, allowing teams to design bespoke API experiences for certain devices. This enables the Netflix app to work across a variety of devices.
The software development team also picked Node.js to develop a lightweight, modular, and quick application.
Results of building an app using Node.js:
The technology has proven to be really successful. Netflix’s new app’s starting time has been shortened by 70 percent. Reducing the environment launch time from 40 minutes to under 1 minute.
2. Paypal
Having to write the frontend and the backend with different languages was the main challenge PayPal’s engineering team was facing.
Results of building an app using Node.js:
By allowing both browser and server apps to be built in JavaScript, Node.js helped the developers overcome the boundary between the browser and the server. It brings together all of the engineering expertise into a single team, allowing better understanding and responding to the consumers’ needs.
With 33 % fewer lines of code and 40 % fewer files, the Node.js app was built almost twice as quickly with fewer employees (compared with previous Java-based applications).
3. LinkedIn
The company decided to use Node.js for its mobile-app backend.
Results of building an app using Node.js:
The new mobile app is up to 20 times faster than the previous Ruby on Rails-based version and utilizes a fraction of the resources — servers were reduced from 30 to 3. The pace of development was unusually quick.
Node.js brought significant performance improvements.
4. Mozilla
Many of Mozilla’s web projects use Node.js.
Mozilla developers chose Node.js for 2 reasons: one was “the memory footprint”, and “it was good to be able to use the same language on the server side and the client side”.
5. Uber
Uber has built its massive matching system on Node.js.
Software developers at Uber chose Node.js for these main reasons:
- It swiftly processes a large amount of data.
- Programs may be reviewed and faults corrected on the go – without having to restart – allowing developers to constantly publish and deploy new code.
- An active open source community is constantly improving the technology, so it effectively improves on its own.
6. Groupon
Enterprise Node.js developers at Groupon chose Node.js for its vibrant community, NPM, performance, and easy scalability.
Results of building an app using Node.js:
Web pages have improved by around 50% in speed as compared to the previous Ruby on Rails platform, and they can now handle significantly more traffic.
7. eBay
For the project, the web engineers had two main requirements. The first step was to make the app as real-time as possible, which meant maintaining live connections to the server. The second step was to coordinate a large number of eBay-specific services that display data on the page.
Results of building an app using Node.js:
Speed and simplicity, performance, scalability, a sense of transparency and control, single-threading, handling I/O-bound activities, and non-blocking I/O.
Types of applications you can build with Node.js
1. Internet of Things (IoT)
The capacity to process multiple overlapping requests is the most compelling reason to choose Node.js for such networks. The event-driven architecture of Node.js allows for asynchronous data processing. As a result, the Node.js servers are not stopped, and data requests are completed quickly.
2. Server-side rendered applications
Because it’s compute demanding, SSR defies many of the expectations about how Node.js should be used. Node.js is capable of handling massive volumes of asynchronous I/O in parallel, but it has compute limitations. Concurrent requests will slow when the computation portion of the request grows (as it happens during SSR), due to CPU contention.
When a server process handles numerous concurrent requests, this becomes essential for SSR. The parallel requests will be delayed due to the processing of other requests. As the number of concurrent users grows, the problem gets worse. This means that when Node.js is used for SSR, it’s not for its concurrency model (as it is for many other apps), but for its library support and browser features.
3. Real-Time Chat Apps
The Event API in Node.js allows software developers to work with any data in an event-driven manner. This feature helps in the implementation of server-side events and push notifications. In real-time communication systems, both of these features are often used.
4. Streaming Apps
The Stream API, which is included into Node.js, makes it an excellent choice for creating streaming apps. Furthermore, Node.js provides a full interface for controlling and processing reading and writing streams.
5. Real-Time Collaboration Software
Real-time collaboration apps are similar to that of real-time chatting. The asynchronous and event-based architecture of Node.js gives it a significant advantage in developing these apps.
6. Apps with microservices architecture
Building microservices with Node.js makes applications efficient and quickly deployable.
Node.js app development
Many well-known companies use Node.js to power their backend apps. It’s fast, lightweight, it’s JavaScript, and it significantly speeds up software development.
So Node.js may be used to create a wide range of apps, from SPAs to IoT. It is a popular choice of startups and enterprises when building microservices and serverless architecture.
Consider using Node.js for your next project if you want to achieve similar outcomes.
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