Meaning of asynchronous = NodeJS

Since ages javascript was termed as a client-side language useful for page rendering only. We required to have two teams, one for the front-end and other for the back-end. Even if you called yourself as a full-stack developer you still had to be a legend in at least two languages (one for frontend while the other for server-side rendering).

But now it seems the prayers of many people have been finally answered and so came NodeJS. JavaScript now has the capability to do things that other scripting languages like Python can do. NodeJS is a javascript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 Javascript runtime. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient. So basically you don't need to worry about creating jobs for processing your code in the backend, using callbacks and promises you can do all the async task handling easily and efficiently. Using a non-blocking request, you can initiate a data request for userB without waiting for the response to the request for userA. You can initiate both requests in parallel. JavaScript allows creating asynchronous and non-blocking code in a very simple way, by using a single thread, callback- functions and event-driven programming. This allows Node.js to handle thousands of concurrent connections with a single server without introducing the burden of managing threads concurrency, which would be a major source of bugs.

Also in terms of resource and skill management if a person knows javascript he can build the front end as well as the backend using the same programming language which can help in having a better communication among teams and also save time. One of the main benefits of Node.js is speed because of its non-blocking paradigm. In terms of the learning curve for NodeJS, its easier compared to other languages.

Keeping this post as an introductory post I would explain the different ways of handling non-blocking code in NodeJS in the following posts.

So stay tuned…..