Why a NodeJS application?

Instructor: In this lecture, I will explain you how to build and deploy the first application. And I'm going to use a Node.js example application for this. First, what is Node.js? Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment which is open source, cross-platform, and is used to execute JavaScript code server side instead of client side. It has an event-driven architecture capable of asynchronous I/O. This makes Node.js capable of responding very fast to requests. For instance, it can immediately give a client the result and asynchronously handle database updates which generally take a longer time. This is one of the reasons why Node.js is used so much. Node.js is used by PayPal, which is using Node.js for its customer-facing side of their web applications. LinkedIn, they use it to deal with scale. Uber to process lots of data quickly, they can address errors on the fly without even a restart with Node.js, and they really like the active community that makes Node.js better over time. Yahoo, Mozilla, Netflix, New York Times, Medium are also users of Node.js. There are a lot of companies using Node.js. So then why Node.js? We use a Node.js example because it's relatively easy to understand, even when you never have used it before. It doesn't need to be compiled, so building the app doesn't take a lot of memory, unlike building Java projects, which is handy if you just want to do this course on small instances. If you're running this on DigitalOcean, you don't have too much memory so Node.js issues come to work fine on those. Once you understand how to build a simple Node.js project, you can use that knowledge to start building larger, more complex projects. So if you really want to build a large Java project, this knowledge is still very good. I will explain everything with a simple application and then you can use that knowledge and apply that when you are building bigger, more complex projects.