Node.js

Node.js, commonly called Node, is practically a requirement for doing modern web application development. In this section, we will discuss what Node is exactly, provide reasons why you need Node, and, finally, talk about where you can get Node installation instructions.

If you are already familiar with these subjects, then feel free to jump to the next section, where we discuss NPM in a similar fashion.

What is Node?

Node was created in late 2009 by Ryan Dahl. Based on Chrome's V8 engine, Node provides a JavaScript runtime built for the purpose of providing evented, non-blocking I/O (input/output) for serving web applications.

At the time, Chrome had created the fastest JavaScript engine available. At the same time, they had decided to open-source the code for it. For these two extremely compelling reasons, Node decided to use the V8 engine.

Ryan Dahl was unhappy with the performance, at the time, of the very popular Apache HTTP server. One of the problems with the way that Apache was...