Introduction

Introduction 

Node.js is a server-side platform built on Google Chrome's JavaScript Engine (V8 Engine). Node.js was developed by Ryan Dahl in 2009 and its latest version is v0.10.36.

Node.js is an open source, cross-platform runtime environment for developing server-side and networking applications. Node.js applications are written in JavaScript, and can be run within the Node.js runtime on OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Linux.

Features of Node.js

Asynchronous and Event Driven - All APIs of Node.js library are asynchronous, that is, non-blocking. It essentially means a Node.js based server never waits for an API to return data. The server moves to the next API after calling it and a notification mechanism of Events of Node.js helps the server to get a response from the previous API call.

Very Fast − Being built on Google Chrome's V8 JavaScript Engine, Node.js library is very fast in code execution.

Single Threaded but Highly Scalable − Node.js uses a single threaded model with event looping.Node.js uses a single threaded program and the same program can provide service to a much larger number of requests than traditional servers like Apache HTTP Server.

No Buffering - Node.js applications never buffer any data. These applications simply output the data in chunks.