Posted on June 17, 2017August 14, 2019 by Abhilash Kumar

5 reasons why nodeJs is so popular

Node.js outshines other web applications by replacing websockets with revolutionary push technology. You would ask, what is so unique about it? Well, we finally have cutting-edge web applications with two-way, real-time connections where both the server and client can build communication, allowing them to exchange valuable data. Now this is in stark contrast to our conventional web response paradigm where only the client initiates communication

Node.js server technology is used to create and run a wide variety of web applications, and is quite similar to what Ruby On Rails, Spring Framework and ASP.NET does. It leverages JavaScript as the main language, which is a lightweight built-in web server and has a plethora of Plugins managed via the Node Package Manager (NPM), allowing you to custom-build your applications to meet your needs. It may sound like any other good web technology, but it has certain features that make it a popular choice among developers to build a wide spectrum of web applications.

Here are the top 5 reasons why nodeJs is so popular nowadays:

1. Node.js is superfast

Node.js is primarily a JavaScript runtime that is powered by V8, developed by Google for use in Chrome. V8 has the ability to compile and execute JavaScript at lightning fast speed, mainly because it compiles JavaScript into a native machine code. In addition to this, Node.js has a magical event loop, which is a single thread performing all I/O operations in an asynchronous manner. In Node.js, when an application has to perform I/O operation, it sends asynchronous tasks and callback action to the event loop, and then continues to perform the rest of the program. On completion of sync operation, the event loop automatically returns to the task to execute callback. This is much unlike traditional looping, which consumes a lot of memory and is exceptionally difficult to execute. Thus, reading/writing to file system, network connections, and to the database is executed very fast in Node. It allows developers to build fast and highly scalable network applications that are capable of handling bulk amounts of simultaneous connections having high throughput.

2. High Performance

PayPal uses Node.js, and has reported doubling the number of requests per-second and reducing the response time by 35%. On the other hand, Wal Mart, the retail giant had a superb experience with Node.js in 2013, when they put all their mobile-based traffic via Node.js on Black Friday, the busiest shopping time of the year. Amazingly, on Black Friday, Wal Mart servers did not go over a mere 1% CPU utilization and yet they deploy with 200,000,000 users online. LinkedIn, the global networking site, moved from Ruby to Node to handle their mobile traffic, and reduced the number of servers to 30 to 3, i.e. almost 90% reduction. The new system was up to 20 times faster. All these figures clearly indicate performance capability of Node.js.

3. JavaScript Everywhere

One of the biggest reasons why Node.js is so popular is because it uses JavaScript as its main language to build web applications. And to be honest, JavaScript is now the only choice to develop web applications in the browser. What more! A new and robust framework is introduced quite frequently to woo developers. With Node.js, JavaScript has literally revolutionized on the server. The language is common to most web developers, and is certainly driving the world today. And according to experts, the trend will not fade away soon.

Since JavaScript is a language that most developers know or have used at some point of time, the transition from another web technology to Node.js is a breeze. This makes it a preferred choice among web developers.

4. It is Lightweight

Typically, Node.js uses a basic event-driven architecture. This means everything executed on it, including every single operation and call, is a series of asynchronous callback. This enables Node to run on a single thread as unlike other web technologies where a new thread is spawned for every client request. This not only makes it light-in-weight, but also forms the foundation of Node’s non-blocking I/O feature.

5. It is Easy to Modify and Maintain

Traditionally built applications become less adaptive and rigid over time as new requirements are fed. Eventually, they start creaking under the stress they were not built for. However, developing new services using Node.js is comparatively easier. With Node, a bunch of small applications is built instead of a single, large application. This allows making changes or adding a new functionality with much ease, without having to make changes deep inside the code-base.

Posted on June 10, 2017July 14, 2017 by Abhilash Kumar

5 good AngularJs framework you must know about

AngularJS is one of the most popular and open-source web application framework maintained by Google and a community of individual developers and corporations to address many of the challenges encountered in developing single-page applications.

If you are already familiar to AngularJS and want to turn on some real magic but don’t know the enough resources to spruce up the coding, don’t worry, some developers have adapted a few front-end frameworks to work and support AngularJS. These Frameworks come with some of useful tools and components that help developers to build innovative web applications quickly and easily.

Below we have gathered 5 Best AngularJS Frameworks you can use for developing your web-applications without much hassle.

1. AngularUI Bootstrap

Angular UI Bootstrap is built on top of the front-end framework called Bootstrap. The framework contains a set of native AngularJS directives based on Bootstrap HTML and CSS components. Angular UI Bootstrap offers several directives, such as carousel, alert, date picker, dropdown, time picker, buttons and more.

2. Ionic

Ionic is a powerful front-end framework optimized for AngularJS for developing mobile applications. The framework uses AngularJS directives to support mobile components, tools and gestures made up of HTML5 and CSS3, thus offering rich user interfaces (UIs). Built with SAAS, Ionic offers a free and open-source software development kit (SDK) as well as a library of UI components for designing interactive, hybrid applications for touch devices.

3. Mobile Angular UI

Mobile Angular UI is a user interface (UI) framework for designing HTML5 mobile applications. It is optimized for AngularJS and Bootstrap and supports powerful libraries like fastclick.js and overthrow.js. The framework offers essential mobile components, such as sidebars, overlays, switches, scrollable areas and more. With Mobile Angular UI, you can design a responsive, mobile user-interface as well as convert desktop web applications to mobile applications.

4. LumX

LumX is a fully-responsive front-end framework based on Google material design guidelines and optimized for AngularJS. LumX is built with SAAS, Neat and Bourbon providing customizable application design for smooth functionality and cool features.

5. Supersonic

Supersonic is a robust user interface framework (UI) for developing hybrid mobile applications. The framework integrates with any REST API (Application Programming Interface) and allows data interaction/modification in the backend. With Supersonic, one can design API-connected mobile applications for iOS and Android.

Posted on May 6, 2017July 14, 2017 by Abhilash Kumar

Top 7 Websites and Apps built with AngularJs

AngularJS is a popular framework for building web applications. When I created my first AngularJS app, I got advice from a colleague at work who had experience on how to set everything up. That helped me tremendously because I didn’t have to guess at best practices. AngularJS provides a great platform to build your website.Today we will look upon top 7 websites built with AngularJS to let you know more about this technology.

1. freelancer.com

Freelancer is the world’s most renowned marketplace for outsourcing. The employer just needs to post the project to get their work done. There are around 15.7 million freelancers registered on this site who compete against each other by bidding on the project.

2. paypal.com

Paypal is one of the worldwide leading Internet payment companies. It’s another example of large websites using AngularJS.

3. angularjs.org

Angularjs.org is a website for learning AngularJS. This site contains videos, free course, tutorials, case studies, documentations and API references to learn AngularJS. This site gives a perfect platform for learning AngularJS to novice.

4. istockphoto.com

Istockphoto has a huge collection of images, videos and photo clips. These images can be purchased at a nominal price of US $0.95 to $1.50 with price range varying on the credits allotted to an image.

5. upwork.com

UpWork is another great website which provides a platform where employer can find freelancers for any job at any time. It allows client to work, hire and interview with freelancers thereby, reducing the efforts to find a suitable employee for the role.

6. localytics.com

Localytics is a marketing platform for mobile and web app owners to build a strong customer relationship through their analytics. This service offering platform is used by 6,000 companies, like Microsoft, eBay, ESPN, and others. Localytics developers were previously using Backbone before they decided to move to AngularJS framework. And now their integrated approach to app helps users to deliver a more personalized experience. They believed AngularJS helped to solve common UI related problems and reduce the amount of code comparing to the previous framework.

7. netflix.com

Netflix is headquartered at California (United States) and provides on request internet streaming media to viewers. It brings the latest movies and TV series at your doorstep by sending you DVDs via Permit Reply Mail.

Posted on April 15, 2017July 3, 2017 by Abhilash Kumar

Code easy with these 3 Array hacks

Arrays are everywhere in JavaScript and with the new spread operators introduced in ECMAScript 6, you can do awesome things with them. In this post I will show you 3 useful tricks you can use when programming.

1. Iterating through an empty array

JavaScript arrays are sparse in nature in that there are a lot of holes in them. Try creating an array using the Array’s constructor and you will see what I mean.

> const arr = new Array(4);
[undefined, undefined, undefined, undefined]

You may find that iterating over a sparse array to apply a certain transformation is hard.

> const arr = new Array(4);
> arr.map((elem, index) => index);
[undefined, undefined, undefined, undefined]

To solve this, you can use Array.apply when creating the array.

> const arr = Array.apply(null, new Array(4));
> arr.map((elem, index) => index);
[0, 1, 2, 3]

2. Passing an empty parameter to a method

If you want to call a method and ignore one of its parameters, then JavaScript will complain if you keep it empty.

> method('parameter1', , 'parameter3');
Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token ,

A workaround that people usually resort to is to pass either null or undefined.

> method('parameter1', null, 'parameter3') // or
> method('parameter1', undefined, 'parameter3');

I personally don’t like using null since JavaScript treats it as an object and that’s just weird. With the introduction of spread operators in ES6, there is a neater way of passing empty parameters to a method. As previously mentioned, arrays are sparse in nature and so passing empty values to it is totally okay. We’ll use this to our advantage.

> method(...['parameter1', , 'parameter3']); // works!

3. Unique array values

I always wonder why the Array constructor does not have a designated method to facilitate the use of unique array values. Spread operators are here for the rescue. Use spread operators with the Set constructor to generate unique array values.

> const arr = [...new Set([1, 2, 3, 3])];
[1, 2, 3]

Posted on March 11, 2017July 11, 2017 by Abhilash Kumar

Top 5 nodeJs framework for Developers

Node.js is one of the more groundbreaking additions to the web development landscape, offering an environment that enables full-stack JavaScript applications for the first time ever. Prior to Node.js, JavaScript was limited to client-side scripting, but Node transformed the script into a cross-over language, capable of writing software that’s portable between the front and back ends.

JavaScript brought its speed and cross-platform compatibility to back-end development, along with its devoted community of JavaScript programmers. In its 2015 developer survey, Stack Overflow found that JavaScript was the most popular programming language—even among back-end developers. This soaring popularity, along with Node’s expansion into an entire development ecosystem, has fueled the creation of numerous Node.js frameworks that both extend and add to Node.js’s existing features.

Let us look at the Node.js framework list representing most powerful and feature rich frameworks available today that help you build real time and scalable web applications with ease.

Express.js

Express.js a lightweight, efficient middleware and routing framework. Express.js is best known as another quarter of the MEAN (MongoDB, Express, AngularJS and Node) stack, and is the most popular Node.js framework. Because Node.js itself wasn’t intended to build websites, the Express framework is able to create an HTTP server in Node, layering in the middleware structure and response/request functions needed to actually run a site. It’s a pretty minimalist framework that’s great for giving developers extra, built-in web application features and the Express API without overriding the already robust, feature-packed Node.js platform. Note that it does require a bit more manual tasks, which can be tedious and time consuming, and has a bit larger footprint than other frameworks.

Socket.io

Socket.io is all about real-time communication and chat apps—the kind of software that hinges on robust event-driven, bidirectional communication between browsers and servers. It’s a websocket-compatible server that’s great at providing collaborative features and real-time analytics, whether they’re in the form of a counter or more in-depth metrics. Socket.io is compatible with every device, operating system, and browser. It’s been used by top tech companies like Trello, Zendesk, Microsoft, and Yammer, as well as Flightcar, a startup that lets people rent out their cars from the airport while they’re traveling.

Hapi.js

Need more enterprise-level functionality? Working with distributed engineering teams? Hapi.js may be the best route for you. Hapi.js was created by developers at Walmart in preparation for Black Friday traffic as an answer to limitations they’d run into with Express—mainly extensibility and maintainability issues. They found that, as the application grew, Express code was more difficult to split into chunks and delegate to different teams. Hapi’s plug-in system enables it to be worked on in sections without breaking the rest of the code base.

Right out of the box, Hapi does a lot more than Express. While there are similarities and differences between the two frameworks, Hapi—which is primarily used for rapidly building and testing application programming interfaces (APIs)—generally enables developers to focus more on writing reusable application logic instead of spending time building infrastructure. It supports API development with an array of plug-ins from authorization and authentication to metrics and logging. It’s been used by heavy-hitters like OpenTable, Macy’s, Condé Nast, and Disney.

Mean.io

Mean.js and Mean.io are frameworks written by the same author with subtle differences. Mean.io was developed first, so it has a bit more documentation and a larger community behind it. It’s based on Node modules, with client- and server-side files in separate modules. Mean.js uses an MVC-style Express/Node back end and an AngularJS-based front end. It also leverages the Grunt tool to enable automated testing.

Mojito

Mojito is an MVC framework based on Yahoo! Cocktails, a JavaScript-based mobile development platform built by developers in house at Yahoo!. Mojito acts like a module that layers very well with other core Node modules, while implementing Cocktails’ on-line/off-line, multi-device, hosted application platform.