A New Light on JavaScript

JavaScript has been around for many years and slowly it has done some major lifting on the internet.  Today you would be hard pressed to find a website that doesn't use it in some fashion.  We have fun and exciting libraries like jQuery, UIKit, Bootstrap, and MooTools just to name a few.  If I didn't write down your favorite library don't freat because there are probably millions on these tools out there.  But for the longest time JavaScript is just a browser technology, or is it?

Have you ever wanted to automate your development process?  There are lots of tools out there but any of them written in JavaScript?  Actually there are several written in JavaScript.  We are talking about tools like Grunt, Gulp, and Bower.  There are more out there all you have to do is look, a quick search on NPM.com for task runner show several hundred systems.

What do all these things now have in common?  Node.js!  This project has opened the door for JavaScript developers that now allow them to not only create stunning websites but to also build a back in system to support their awesome designs.  Node.js is a cross platform system that allows JavaScript programmers to develop some very sophisticated programs.  The first example you will see in Node.js is how to build a very simple web server in less than 8 lines of code.

Node.js was designed because many server block the process while they do work and the developer of Node.js didn’t like wasting so much processor time while waiting for slow disk access or even slow network access.  Since they launched Node.js in ~2010, hard to find an exact date from their website, it has grown to be one of the most supported projects.

Among the couple hundred thousand free modules you will find things to help your build process, valid your code, and even test it before you publish.  If there is a tedious task that you don’t want to do every time you write code then I bet there is a utility already written that will handle these tasks for you.

This should be enough to get peek your interest into Node.js.  If you’re really interested look into our getting started with Node.js tutorial.