5 Types of Applications You Can Build With Node js

5 Types of Applications You Can Build With Node js

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment built and event-driven programming that enables non-blocking I/O capable of serving multiple concurrent events in a single thread. Non-blocking I/O makes Node.js very fast, lightweight, scalable, and efficient application in handling data-heavy and I/O-heavy workloads characteristic of several types of Node.js web applications. In this informatic article, we are going to show that Node.js can be used in enlarged and many kind of applications, and we have described 5 most popular solutions, including IoT applications, real-time chat, real-time collaboration tools, single page application and streaming apps.

1.Internet of things with node.js

IoT (Internet of Things) is a network of devices such as sensors, beacons, actuators, and any other embedded items with electronics that enables them to send and exchange data and showing information in electronic forms. Normally, IoT systems pass data from devices to servers and from servers to applications that process it and display it to users. IoT may consist thousands of such devices, which makes it challenging to manage request and data stream from and between the devices.

The importance of Node.js as a back-end for such networks is its ability to process multiple concurrent request and even million of devices on the network. The avalanche of requests and data coming from IoT devices does not block Node.js servers thanks to their event-driven architecture and asynchronous processing suitable for I/O-heavy operations on the IoT network. This makes Node.js fast as an application layer between these devices and databases used to store data originating from them.

The maturity of the Node.js ecosystem for IoT explains why the environment has been used successfully in many IoT products. For example, Skycatch used Node.js in its specialized drones that take photos of construction sites and turn them into 3D models and data needed to kick start construction projects. Node.js is also used successfully in commercial products such as Siemens Smart Grid(Monet), a power management solution that is designed to save energy resources and detect energy use anomalies and potential hazards. Monet uses Node.js as an application layer and MongoDB for data storage, both hosted in the Microsoft Azure Cloud for node.js application development.

2. Build real-time chat application with node.js

Real-time chat is any online communication tool that enables the live transmission of text, videos, or audio messages from a sender to a receiver in an electronic devices. Real-time chats can take the form of one to one or one to many group chats built possible in instant messaging(IM) or Internet Relay Chat (IRC) technologies. These days, real-time chat feature and its technology are widely used in social networking, commercial sites, and pretty much everywhere in internet.

Node.js provides all basic functionalities for building real-time chats of any complexity. In particular, Node.js has a powerful event API that have facilitates creating certain kind of objects that periodically emit named events “listened” by event handlers. Node.js is only framework for make it easy to implement in a server-side events and firebase push notifications widely used in instant messaging and schedule messaging and other real-time applications.

Architecture of Node.js is work in the WebSockets protocol that facilitates a fast two-way exchange of messages between the client and the server via one open connection. By installing WebSockets libraries on the server and the client side, you can implement real-time messaging that has lower overheads and latency, and faster data transfer than most other, more conventional, solutions.

3. Develop single page application with node.js

In node.js, Single Page Application (SPAs) are a popular approach to web development in which an entire application fits on a single page with the goal of providing a user experience similar to a desktop app.

In SPAs, all client-side scripts are loaded into a single HTML page that works as the main entry point of the web application, while all views/layouts are loaded into this central template on demand. At the same time, background AngularJS requests ensure that the application and updates without the need for a full page reload/refresh, which makes it feel as if you were using a desktop application.

SPAs are widely used to create social networking apps, online drawing and text tools, and many more. The classic example of a SPA is Gmail, with its Angularjs-powered seamless updates of newly arrived messages.

Node.js is a great fit for SPAs thanks to its efficient handling of asynchronous calls and heavy I/O workloads characteristic of these applications. Node.js working with data-driven SPAs, where the server act as a backend that provides data to the client whereas the client does all the HTML rendering.

You can turn Node.js into a RESTfull API for streaming data and services from specific route. Such approach helps reduce the server’s load while ensuring API sharing across different applications and environments. In this case of Node.js, It would only return the index page (index.html) while data would be sent via RESTfull interfaces and controllers implemented in a server. From the design point of view.

Finally, Node.js is pretty good for SPAs because it is written in the same language (JavaScript) as many popular JavaScript frameworks like Ember, Meteor, React, Angular used in building SPAs. Since both Node.js and browsers use JavaScript, there is less context switching between them, and developers can use the same data and language structures and modular approaches both on the server and the client side. This results in faster development. The above advantage of Node.js have been taken by few platforms such as Netflix, Linkedin, Medium and much more.

4. Real-time collaboration tools in node.js

Real-time collaboration application, The wide variety of software solutions for project management, video, audio conferencing, application sharing of documents these all are use node.js platform for collaboration applications, we know about Slack, slack is use for group chats and management of remote teams and also Trello - project management portal which are use node.js for managing that data seamlessly.

As in this case we can say that Node.js is asynchronous and event-based architecture. It is a great fit for real time collaboration apps. In these applications, many events and I/O requests occur concurrently. For ex. few users can edit the same paragraph, comment, post messages, and attach media and then Changes to one piece of content might be applied only after a cascade of events, where each step depends on the previous one.

Using Node.js we can instantly update the collaboration environment so that all users have a single and representation of the application. This is the reason why the team of the project management application Trello uses the Node.js. The engineering team of Trello decided that Node.js would be great to instantly propagate a lot of updates and hold a lot of open connections, Among other real-time collaboration apps built on Node.js.

5. Streaming app development in node.js

We know you have question how does streaming app work? You can find your answer in this article So let’s start, the program is executed on the end user’s local machine. Application streaming allows for downloading parts of the application on demand without overloading the server and the local computer. Initially, only certain parts of the application needed for bootstrap are downloaded, whereas the remainder can be downloaded in the background if needed. When the application is completely downloaded, it can function without any network connection at all. In case you want to save some data in your account, the application can initiate server requests. Similarly, server events can update your local application without too much network traffic overhead this is possible with help of node.js implementation.

Node.js is excellent for the streaming app development, Node.js has an interface of readable and editable streams that can be processed, monitored and very smoothly. Stream instances are basically Unix pipes that allow transmitting parts of the app’s executable code to the local machine while keeping a connection open for new components to download on demand. Streams allow users to pipe requests to each other, and stream data directly to its final destination. Streams do not require caching and temporary data – just an open connection to stream application data from one place to another.