SE-2840 Dr. Mark L. Hornick1 NodeJS Server-side JavaScript

What is Node about? Historically, server-side code has been written in “professional-strength” languages PHP Python Java C# Ruby While on the client (browser) side, Javascript has become the defacto standard language SE-2840 Dr. Mark L. Hornick2

Why? Javascript was originally seen as a “toy” language Javascript, as an interpreted language, was considered slow Server-side code needed to be fast, powerful (expressive), and have access to a large set of code libraries …add other excuses here… SE-2840 Dr. Mark L. Hornick3

Javascript today Has matured, although it still has some rough edges Is actively evolving Is more well-understood The underlying engines have become incredibly fast Has a huge developer base and wide support Javascript has grown up SE-2840 Dr. Mark L. Hornick4

What is Node? Node was created by Google and uses the V8 “engine” to execute Note: The V8 engine is written in C Minimally, you can think of Node as a standalone Javascript implementation that can run outside a browser, like Python or Java It includes additional modules (libraries) that allow it to run server-related activies that are not possible on the client (browser) side, like Accessing the file system Receiving and responding to http requests SE-2840 Dr. Mark L. Hornick5

Hello World demo SE-2840 Dr. Mark L. Hornick6