Introducing about Node.js Frameworks and tools - AkuCode
Node.js is a low-level the platform, and to make things easier and more interesting for developers thousand of libraries were built upon Node.js. many of those established over time as popular options. Here is a non-comprehensive list to the ones I consider very relevant and worth learning:
- Express , one of the most simple yet powerful ways to create a web server. Its minimalist approach, unopinionated, focused on the core features of a server, is key to its success.
- Meteor , an incredibly powerful full-stack the framework, powering you with an isomorphic approach to building apps with JavaScript, sharing code on the client and the server. Once an off-the-self a tool that provided everything now integrates with frontend libs React, Vue, and Angular. It can be used to create mobile apps as well.
- Koa , built by the same team behind Express, aims to be even simpler and smaller, building on top of years of knowledge. The new project born out of the need to create incompatible changes without disrupting the existing community.
- Next.js , a framework to render server-side rendered React applications.
- Micro , a very lightweight server to create asynchronous HTTP microservices.
- Socket.io , a real-time communication engine to build network applications.
A brief history of Node
A look back on the history of Node.js from 2009 to today
Believe it or not, Node.js is just 9 years old. In comparison, JavaScript is 23 years old and the web as we know it (after the introduction of Mosaic) is 25 years old. 9 years is such a little amount of the time for technology, but Node.js seems to have been around forever.
I’ve had the pleasure to work with Node since the early days when it was just 2 years old, and despite the little information available, you could already feel it was a huge thing.
In this port, I want to draw the big picture of Node in its history, to put things in perspective.
- A little bit of history
JavaScript is a programming language that was created at Netscape as a scripting tool to manipulate web pages inside their browser, Netscape Navigator . Part of the business model of Netscape was to sell Web Servers, which included an environment called Netscape LiveWire, which could create dynamic pages using server-side JavaScript. So the idea of server-side JavaScript was not introduced by Node.js, but it’s old just like JavaScript – but at the time it was not successful.
One the key factor that led to the rise of Node.js was timing. JavaScript since a few years was starting being considered a serious language, thanks for the “Web 2.0” applications that showed the world that a modern experience on the web could be like (thinks Google Maps or Google Mail). The JavaScript engine performance bar raised considerably thanks to the browser competition battle, which is still going strong. Development teams behind each major browser work hard every day to give us better performance, which is a huge win for JavaScript as a platform. V8, the engine that Node.js uses under the hood, is one of those and in particular it’s the Chrome JS engine.
But of course, Node.js is not popular just because of pure luck or timing. It introduced much innovative thinking on how to program in JavaScript on the server.
- 2009
Node.js is born The first form of npm is created
- 2010
Express is born Socket.io is born
- 2011
Npm hits 1.0 Big companies start adopting Node: LinkedIn, Uber Hapi is born
- 2012
Adoption continues very rapidly
- 2013
First big blogging platform using Node: Ghost Koa is born
- 2014
Big Drama: IO.js is a major fork of Node.js, with the goal of introducing ES6 support and move
- 2015
The Node.js Foundation is born IO.js is merged back into Node.js npm introduces private modules Node 4(no 1,2,3 versions were previously released)
- 2016
The left-pad incident Yarn is born Node 6
- 2017
Npm focuses more on security Node 8 HTTP/2 V8 introduces Node in its testing suite, officially making Node a target for the JS engine, in addition to Chrome 3 billion npm downloads every week
- 2018
Node 10 ES modules .mjs experimental support