Learning Node.js for .NET Developers

When to use Node.js

As discussed earlier in this chapter, Node.js recognizes that I/O is a bottleneck for many applications. On most programming platforms, threads will waste time blocking on I/O operations. There are approaches developers can take to avoid this, but these all involve adding some complexity to their code. In Node.js, the platform itself provides a completely natural approach.

Writing web applications

The flagship use case for Node.js is building web applications. These are inherently event-driven as most or all processing takes place in response to HTTP requests. Also, many websites do little computational heavy-lifting of their own. They tend to perform a lot of I/O operations:

• Streaming requests from the client
• Talking to a database, ...