Why I chose Javascript as my main technology?

I was around 13 years old when I decided that I will become a programmer. I was fascinated by the fact that I write some code and I see its result instantaneously. After years of learning and finishing the university, I started to work as a programmer. I enjoyed seeing that I gave value to the companies I worked with, which motivated me to stay relevant and improve my skills.

During these years I saw some technologies disappear and others rise, thus I decided to choose Javascript as my main technology. It’s hard to predict the future, but I tried to do so, by choosing the programming language of the browser.

Today I consider Javascript a great choice as the main technology. Nowadays every successful company is present on the web, and they use Javascript directly or indirectly.

I invested some time in collecting and structuring my thoughts about Javascript. My purpose is to answer 3 questions:

1. What is Javascript?
2. Which are good examples of using Javascript?
3. What are the benefits of using Javascript?

What is Javascript?

Javascript is a programming language and is one of the core components of the internet. It’s also called the language of the browser and in the beginning, it was responsible to make websites interactive. Nowadays it can be also used on the server side (known to many of you as Node.js) to build highly scalable data-intensive systems.

So what is Node.js? According to https://nodejs.org/en/, it is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment. Let me translate this for you: Node.js allows Javascript to be run on any environment not just in a browser.

Which are good examples of using Javascript?

I consider as good examples the applications which require to be real-time and data-intensive (but low in data processing/computation). For example, Node.js is a good fit for a chat application. A chat app is data-intensive, with high traffic, and requires two-way real-time communication. Tru web sockets client applications and the server can initiate communication, allowing to exchange data freely. Additionally, this communication can be run over the standard port 80 which does not require extra permissions.

A platform that reflects user tracking data (the count of likes, or shares) is another good example of a project that runs well on Node.js. When you are receiving a high amount of concurrent data, your database can become a bottleneck. Node.js is good to push database writes off the side and deal with them later.

A data streaming platform is also a neat use case, as Node.js allows real-time video and audio encoding while uploading the stream.

I do not recommend Node.js for computation-heavy operations, nor for accessing blocking resources that might block Node.js’s responsiveness.

What are the benefits of using Javascript?

A great win of using Javascript is that you can use it across the stack (you can use it both on the client side and on the server side), which would unify the language and the data format (JSON).

It has a huge open module ecosystem and you can easily install these packages with npm or yarn. Node.js is highly scalable and is great for building fast, scalable network applications, as it’s capable of handling a huge number of simultaneous connections with high throughput.

I hope reading my article was not a waste of time for you.

I’m planning to write more articles related to my expertise. Drop me a message if you have a topic that interests you.

Leave a comment in case you have a good example for a Node.js project.