What is Node.js Used For? 6 Practical Use Cases That Surprise

Real-Time Chat Apps

You've probably noticed that real-time conversations are now ubiquitous on almost every website, especially enterprise and digital products. The great news is that Node.js provides built-in capabilities for developing real-time chat applications. Using its Event API, developers can easily create server-side events and push notifications, similar to popular chat apps like Skype and Facebook Messenger.

It's a game-changer that empowers developers to create engaging and interactive chat experiences. Since over 80% of consumers expect instant responses from businesses, Node.js equips you with the tools you need to meet this expectation and enable seamless real-time communication on your website.

Microservices Architecture

In recent years, the popularity of microservices architecture has soared,
driven by tech giants like Amazon, Facebook and Netflix.

When it comes to developing this approach, Node.js is the perfect technology. It makes it easy to deploy multiple server instances for individual microservices and facilitates the creation of appropriate routing addresses for each instance. 

A survey conducted by Statista found that 81.5% of companies already use microservices and 17.5% plan to implement them within the next year. By using Node.js, companies can increase the speed of their applications while significantly reducing the overall code base. This means faster software development cycles and better performance.

Single-Page Applications (SPAs)

Single-page apps (SPAs) compress the entire program onto a single page and provide the user with a desktop-like experience.

Node.js excels at handling asynchronous calls and performing intensive I/O operations, making it a perfect fit for SPAs. This runtime environment is particularly well-suited for data-driven single-page apps, where the server acts as the back-end and passes data to the client, while the client-side handles the HTML rendering. By using Node.js, these advances will make your single-page app more maintainable and reduce development time.

Proxy Servers and Reverse Proxies

Creating a proxy server is easier with Node.js. While there are affordable third-party ones like Nginx or HAProxy, they can present complex challenges when used for large-scale websites. In such cases, This cross-platform runtime environment can serve as a server-side proxy that efficiently collects data from multiple third-party sources.

Whether you're creating a news website like BBC, a media platform like Forbes, or an entertainment site like IMDb, you need to load content from various third-party domains. Node.js is invaluable when it comes to mediating various services, even if they have different response times. When Node.js is used as a server-side proxy, it can handle numerous simultaneous connections without blocking the flow of data. This non-blocking capability ensures smooth performance, even under heavy loads.

Streaming Applications

Thanks to the native stream API and the inclusion of readable and writable streams, streams in Node.js revolutionize data processing by handling inputs and outputs sequentially and piece by piece. This approach minimizes memory consumption and eliminates the need to store temporary data, ensuring a smooth and efficient download process.

This open-source ecosystem brings significant merits when dealing with large files, as it avoids excessive consumption of storage space on devices. YouTube is a prime example of Node.js-based streaming, where videos are seamlessly composed of smaller bits of data that are continuously processed by the application.

Internet of Things (IoT)

Node.js brings several key advantages to IoT development. First, it's lightweight and efficient, making it ideal for the resource-constrained environments typically found in IoT devices. Node.js uses a non-blocking, event-driven architecture that enables asynchronous communication and real-time data processing. This capability is especially beneficial in IoT scenarios where devices need to generate massive amounts of data and communicate with each other seamlessly.

Node.js' extensive collection of modules and libraries provides developers with ready-to-use tools for various IoT needs, such as processing sensor data, interacting with hardware devices, and managing communication protocols.