The Evolution of the Node.Js Ecosystem (DeveloperWeek Global 2020)

The Evolution of the Node.js Ecosystem

• Node.js has been widely adopted and is growing rapidly, with 10 million users and a growth rate of 50% per year.
• Node.js is not just a runtime for JavaScript, but a broad full stack ecosystem that can be used for building web front end, mobile and tablet development, desktop development, cloud backends, IoT devices, third-party APIs and service-oriented architectures, and blockchain and decentralized applications.
• Node.js is optimized for single-process execution with limited memory space, making it suitable for use cases like serverless and function as a service.
• JavaScript is transcompiled to efficient machine code using Babel, and has built-in support for concurrency using ES6 Promises and Async/Await.
• Node.js has a large and active community, with over 1 million packages published on NPM, and more than 450 new packages published daily.
• Many companies use Node.js in production, including Google, PayPal, GoDaddy, and eBay.
• Node.js finds application in areas like IoT devices, blockchain and decentralized applications, and robots, among others.
• Truffle and Web3JS are two important projects within the Node.js ecosystem, providing tools for building blockchain-based applications and interacting with Ethereum nodes.
• GraphQL is a data query language that provides an alternative to REST and adult web service architectures, making it easier to evolve APIs over time.
• The event loop in Node.js allows for non-blocking IO operations, making it suitable for building scalable and efficient applications.