Description

javascript has existed since 1995 and has since taken over as the dominant language for web development. For much of its life, JavaScript was used mainly for client-side scripting inside tags executing in web browsers. This limitation meant that developers were often working in many different languages and frameworks between the front-end (client-side) and backend (server-side) aspects of a web application.

Although there were other projects to bring JavaScript to server-side applications, the functionality took off with the launch of Node.js in 2009. Node allows developers to write JavaScript code that runs directly in a computer process itself instead of in a browser. Node can, therefore, be used to write server-side applications with access to the operating system, file system, and everything else required to build fully-functional applications.

Node.js is written in C, C++, and JavaScript, and it is built on the open-source V8 JavaScript engine which also powers JS in browsers such as Google Chrome. As V8 supports new features in JavaScript, they are incorporated into Node.