Introduction to Node.js

I am writing this article for beginners to understand what Node.js is, why we need it, and how it was made. It is one of the greatest server-side technologies you can learn these days. Many web developers use Node.js, and its powerful features and advantages make it a popular technology. Once you understand it and start working with it, you’ll naturally want to explore Node.js more. Let’s explore!

The official definition of Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on Google’s open-source V8 JavaScript engine. Ryan Dahl developed Node.js on May 27th, 2009.

Probably you have already used JavaScript before, probably just inside the browser. Any browser natively understands HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. and no matter if you write vanilla JavaScript or some JavaScript library or framework like React or Angular, that’s all just JavaScript that gets executed right inside the browser. So in this case, the browser is the JavaScript runtime. But what if we could take JavaScript out of the browser and simply execute our JavaScript code somewhere else without all the restrictions that we have in the browser? In this case, Node.js is the solution.

So according to the above discussion, you need to understand that Node.js is just another JavaScript runtime. It’s like a container or environment in which a program written in JavaScript can be executed, but outside of the browser. Here, JavaScript code is executed but not by the browser, where the v8 engine developed by Google comes into play in Node.js.

Node.js depends on a variety of dependencies to function as it does, and the two most important dependencies are the V8 engine and LIBUV. Some other dependencies are llhttp, OpenSSL, c-areas, and zlib.

• V8 engine: Convert JavaScript code into machine code
• LIBUV: Provide support for asynchronous I/O operations
• llhttp: For Parsing HTTP
• OpenSSL: For Cryptography
• c-areas: For DNS requests
• zlib: For fast Compression and Decompression

So therefore, Node.js is a program written in C++ and JavaScript. The beauty of this is that Node.js ties all these dependencies together and gives developers access to their functions in pure JavaScript.

I believe now you have an understanding of what Node.js is, why we need it, and how it was made. I’ll deeply explain Node.js architecture and all in my upcoming blogs.

Thank you for reading😊
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