Bringing Node.js to Your Project: Pros and Cons

“ Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. ”

Digging deeper: Node.js applications

Node.js: Pros and Cons

Pros

Javascript. Node.js uses single programming language – JavaScript . It is easy to learn and allows developers to use the runtime environment for both frontend and backend in JavaScript, without using any server-side programming language.

Microservices architecture. The platform is fast and highly scalable, as it consists of microservices that can be built on top of the existing solutions as well as integrated with one another. This means that you can break the whole project into small modules which are independent, though tightly coupled with one another.

Asynchronous non-blocking code. Using Node.js , you benefit from asynchronous non-blocking code, as resources are consumed by web servers more economically, so that they can support more parallel client connections for the applications where input-output operations are run. We would say that the implementation of such a code is comparatively good as it is in Ruby , Java , or Python .

Node package manager. You can enrich existing ecosystem with npm – free and open-source package manager for Node.js featuring free tools and libraries which are being actively developed and enhanced.

Cons

No basic libraries or tools. Each of the applications has a lot of alternatives which makes it harder to choose a right stack. The only possible way we see is to check and choose between a plenty of them, as often applied documentation doesn’t offer a comprehensive picture of advantages and disadvantages.

Poor for relational data access. Although some relational databases, such as PostgreSQL or RethinkDB seem to work better for Node.js applications with each release, their support in Node.js is still underdeveloped.

Unsuitable for heavy processing. When it comes to CPU intensive operation and the thread is occupied with heavy computation, Node.js benefits of non-blocking I/O model melt away, as all the incoming requests are being blocked.

Multithreading is not supported. That’s why many developers consider the technology unsuitable for complicated web applications. However, our experience shows that it can be used as efficiently as php for large-scale projects when clustering multiple Node.js processes. Simply put, to have multiple threads, you need to run multiple processes as well.