Getting Started with NodeJS

3 min readMay 5, 2022

NodeJS is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment. This runtime environment was developed by Ryan Dalh with the aim of developing real-time web applications with push capabilities. With the help of V8 engine (Chrome’s JavaScript engine) NodeJS can execute JavaScript code outside a web browser. But the most important thing with NodeJS is the ability to handle concurrent requests with its non-blocking I/O. Because of that NodeJS is now widely used for developing server-side and networking applications.

Let’s take a look at some of the key characteristics of NodeJS

NodeJS has an event-driven architecture which is capable of doing I/O operations asynchronously. This makes NodeJS lightweight and efficient.
NodeJS does not create a thread for each connection. It handles all of them in a single thread. Its’ non-blocking I/O helps it to achieve that.
NodeJS uses Chrome’s V8 engine. The V8 engine compiles JavaScript code into machine code directly.
NodeJS represents a “JavaScript everywhere” paradigm. That means it allows developers to use a single programming language from one end of the applications to the other end.
‘npm’ package manager gives access to large number of open source libraries
Since NodeJS is open-source, developers can edit the source code for their liking.

When to use NodeJS?

NodeJS is ideal for developing,

I/O bound applications
Fast scalable network applications
Real-time applications
JSON APIs based applications
Single page applications

LinkedIn, Netflix, Uber, Trello, PayPal, NASA, eBay and Medium are some of the popular companies that use NodeJS as their JavaScript run-time environment.

Now let’s take a quick look at how you can set up NodeJS environment on your PC.

Step 1 — Download the installer from NodeJS website