What is JavaScript?
JavaScript or JS for short can be simply defined as the ‘programming language’ for the web. But it is in fact, a scripting language that can manipulate data for web pages and produce the magical and responsive static information that you see on everyday websites.
Whenever you come across any functionality on a web page such as online games, interactive maps, animations, or graphics. You can just assume without a doubt that there is JavaScript involved.
JavaScript is the third layer of the well-known web development construct of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In easier words, HTML is the foundation for your web page, CSS is responsible for styling as it literally stands for Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript is what makes it all work, allowing one to actually ‘use’ the website.
While being an asset for developers on its own, JavaScript also allows for smooth integration with web APIs, which are blocks of code that perform a specific task and can be imported into a website pre-built.
Dynamic and Static JS
| Dynamic JS | Static JS |
| dynamic code refers to both the client and server-side programming, Dynamic JS scripts can generate content on-demand such as manipulation of custom data, and tables, and procedurally generating animations, etc. | Static JS scripts simply show what you have already scripted with no changes unless prompted. |
Benefits
JavaScript yields numerous benefits ranging from customization all the way to browser security and request management:
- Proper Programming Environment for the Web
- Extension Support
- Both Back-End and Front-End Development Environment
- Responsive and Easier Event Handlers
- Easy to Work With
- Network Scripting
- Request Handling
- Event Handling
- Network-Security
With the progression of time, JavaScript has evolved and has been introduced with multiple frameworks, each designed for a similar purpose but different functionality.
The first official front-end framework for JavaScript was Angular and quite a while after that came Node.js, which has since become the largest and most popularly used framework of JavaScript.
How does Node.js Work?
The main reason and purpose of JavaScript frameworks are to simply make JavaScript development easier. Node.js does just that, it is a runtime environment that is written in JavaScript as its base, it runs on Chrome’s V8 engine and it is perfectly suitable for building both server-side and networking applications using JS.
Node.js has numerous capabilities including single-threaded event looping which basically waits for requests indefinitely. It queues them, if one does not require a blocking I/O op, it processes it, if it does require one, it simply assigns a thread from the ‘worker group’ or the thread pool, making Node.js extremely scalable, easy on the pocket, incredibly fast and reliable.
Node.js has an asynchronous approach when it comes to handling APIs, unlike generic JS, Node.js waits on an API to return a response, if it does not, it simply moves on to the next API while it waits on the latter.
This allows the Node.js framework to be extremely efficient and suitable for networking and back-end applications. Although it is suitable for back-end apps, it can also handle front-end ops quite efficiently as well, it’s a well-known misconception that Node.js is only applicable to back-end.