Have you heard of Nodejs ? Do you know what node actually is?
What was JavaScript made for ❔
JavaScript was the programming language made to control websites🌐 and the web 🕸️. It was not for anything else. Just for websites and the Web. So we could only build the frontend of an application (frontend is the the part of the website that the user sees). So the backend code of the website had to be written in another programming language if we wanted more functionality for our web apps.
So what does node do ❓
Well, as I mentioned above, JavaScript could be used only for the frontend, but with the help of node we can write backend code, with JavaScript! Node🟩 was created in 2009 by Ryan Dahl. With Node, we can create web servers, desktop applications, command line apps, and a lot more!
If you want a definition for node
Nodejs is a JavaScript Runtime, which helps us to run JavaScript in the server side
Which simply means, node can helps use write code like on the backend.
Node is popular!
After the creation of node, a lot of very popular frameworks and libraries were born. also the Node Package Manager (npm) was something which allowed developers to install Third Party Packages created by other developers. Some popular frameworks/Libraries that came into existance because of Node or NPM are
- Express
- Fastify
- Angular
- React
- Electron
and More... You can watch this video if you want to install node.js 👇