With multiple options in hand, product owners can choose the best technologies for their web development projects. One such technology is NodeJS; being an intuitive platform, it has grown enormously as a promising option for the community of product owners. Choosing a technology requires concrete research to fulfill the entire project’s needs. So, you should hire NodeJS developers and select everything ideally from various frameworks, development tools, IDEs, etc., for the full-proof execution of your web app development project.
The fact is we love to eat a dish which is made with the proper ingredients. Similarly, if you choose and implement the appropriate components during your NodeJS development process, you will only get your desired product as a result.
This ultimate NodeJS guide will help you choose the suitable technology from top frameworks, development tools, and IDEs for your NodeJS development.
NodeJS Overview
Launched by Ryan Dahl in 2009, Node.js is an open-source platform developed with the help of Google Chrome JS runtime. It allows product owners to create impressive, scalable web apps using several code lines.
The software development world is constantly emerging with the latest techniques, trends, and languages. But, with the Node.js library of modules, app development is crucially simplified. It offers fast and efficient products for back-end development, and it integrates firmly with front-end platforms.
Framework Innovations for NodeJS
NodeJS frameworks are enormously gaining popularity in web programming and app development. These Frameworks aim to provide you with functionality that is not available in NodeJS out of the box to get you up and running as quickly as possible.
Following are the top framework innovations that add comprehensive features and functionalities to NodeJS.
ActionHero
ActionHero is a NodeJS framework and API server that offers custom packages for organizations of all sizes with high-end customer support.
At its core, it allows you to hire NodeJS developers to write a RESTful API that you can consume either via WebSockets, HTTP, or direct TCP Socket connections. Another way to do this is with the help of a front-end ActionHero Client based on the framework’s Primus.
It is beneficial to use this to offer real-time data to your users and even enable them to communicate with each other with the help of chat rooms, and that is natively compatible with this framework.
This framework also offers scalability and flexibility out of the box; as such, it offers Redis to get in touch with several other nodes in the network chain.
Well-known brands like Riot Games, Task Rabbit, Madglory, and Samsung utilize the ActionHero framework.
Express
One of the most basic NodeJS frameworks, Express, is distributed worldwide under the MIT license. This robust framework offers a resilient structure for processing various requests. Its seamless integration with vast community-developed modules that serve major project requirements helps you significantly.
This lightweight framework is wholly focused on performance above anything. It also enables you to quickly scaffold a web-app development project with the help of a generator so that you skip directly to writing codes with the assistance of dedicated developers.
Some of its extensive features are template engines, multiple routing, middlewares, etc. Famous companies like Klout, MySpace, Segment.io, and Yummly prefer Express for their primary web apps.
Derby.js
Derby is another crucial full-stack MVC framework mainly used for typical web-app development. Derby’s comprehensive features enable you to synchronize text data and JSON between servers, browsers, and databases for real-time collaboration.
If you have a dynamic or heavy front-end, it would be an excellent choice for you, as it’s pretty compatible with server-side rendering.
Its additional features offer you template bindings, conflict resolution, and offline usage to simplify writing several user applications.
Hapi
Hapi is entirely capable of building full-stack sites and enterprise-level features. Walmart’s development team switched from Express to Hapi due to its maintainability and extensibility support as their app became famous worldwide.
They required another impressive framework to accommodate the Black Friday influx of users. Thus, the dedicated developers at Walmart developed Hapi.
However, product owners use this features-rich framework for creating services that pull information from the back-end and cater to it efficiently, all while keeping the code lines maintained.
Features include input and response validation, cookie-parsing, server-side caching sessions, logging, and others.
Hapi comprises several API development plugins for authentication, documentation, and various other functions. Big brands like Disney and Macy’s utilize Hapi.
Koa.js
Koa.js is commonly known as the “next-gen web framework for Node.js” and has similar functionalities to Express. It helps you as a lightweight Node.js framework to build efficient web apps and APIs to improve the user experience of NodeJS eCommerce, small and medium businesses websites.
Koa.js makes use of generated-based control flows to remove callbacks and rectify errors. Unlike most popular frameworks, Koa is exceptionally modular and depends less on middleware. However, plugin packages are also there for caching, compression, routing, etc.
NodeJS Development Tools
Product owners use NodeJS development tools for a wide range of apps and workflows. These comprehensive tools make it quite simple for product owners to work with NodeJS.
It doesn’t matter if you are an amateur or an expert in app development; the following NodeJS development tools will benefit you.
Babel
The intuitive JavaScript transpiler Babel is mainly used as a tool for front-end development. It helps you utilize all ES6 functionalities while compiling ES5 for production, resulting in a code readability improvement.
Babel can work with JavaScript’s latest version so that you can hire NodeJS developers to use the newest syntax without any wait for browser compatibility.
Electrode.io
Electrode.io is another comprehensive tool developed by WalmartLab’s development team. It is a universal platform to build NodeJS and React apps with the help of the most standardized strategy, structures, best practices, and advanced technology.
Using Electrode.io, you can shift greater focus to universality and consistency instead of customization and configuration. This ensures performance and reusability.
Broccoli
Broccoli is a typical framework innovation for NodeJS to build web apps. It runs on an ES6 module that boasts blazing redevelopment and compiles speeds, a flexible ecosystem, and chainable plugins. Broccoli is also known as “the asset pipeline for aspiring apps.”
Logo.io
It can be a compelling task to monitor thousands of files spread across several computers. Log.io Being a real-time log monitoring tool, Logo.io helps you monitor your assets and deployments and quickly execute troubleshooting. It provides exposure to a stateless TCP API where you can write your daily logs too. You can watch your log data in a single browser session to address the bugs and issues immediately.
PM2
PM2 is an impressive production process manager for NodeJS. It helps you by monitoring all the launched processes to determine if they are running expectedly or not.
According to a famous Stack Developer, Mariusz Dybciak, “ You don’t have to worry about restarting apps after they have crashed, PM2 will do it for you” The online payment gateway, PayPal, and the financial software company, Intuit, use PM2.
Advanced IDEs for NodeJS
An Integrated Development Environment(IDE) comprises various tools for a myriad of NodeJs web apps. The majority of IDEs are used as an automation tool builder, source code editor, and debugger. It allows product owners to edit and debug their codes in a fast and accurate manner.
Following are the handpicked choices of advanced and modern IDEs for NodeJS.
Aptana Studio
If you are familiar with Eclipse, then you should try Aptana Studio. This Eclipse-based IDE was customized down to focus on web app technologies and famous frameworks.
Using Aptana Studio, you can assist dedicated developers in building and testing apps in a single environment, as it supports the latest browser technologies like HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3, Rails, PHP, Ruby, and Python.
Brackets
Introduced by Adobe Systems, Brackets is a powerful text editor with robust features that offer live code previewing, inline editing, code folding, preprocessor support, and command-line integration.
It makes use of preprocessor support and visual tools that help in making it easier for both web designers and front-end developers to work from the browser.
Atom
Atom is an advanced, open-source text editor developed with JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and NodeJS integration. It has several robust features like a built-in package manager, where you can find, install, and build new packages on Windows, OS X, or Linux, and intelligent auto-completion to make code writing faster and easier.
The best thing about Atom is that it’s completely customizable. You can even change the core packages.
Cloud 9
Using Cloud 9, web and API development becomes relatively more straightforward. It offers you the combination of a powerful online editor and a Ubuntu workspace in the Cloud, so you would only hire NodeJS developers to build, run and debug your code efficiently.
Some of its significant features are language and code complexion tools, a debugger, a built-in terminal, split view, etc. You can extend these functionalities with the help of a simple extension manager.
Wrapping Up
NodeJS is receiving popularity day by day for web and application developments worldwide. This ultimate write-up to NodeJS frameworks, IDEs and development tools will surely help you build an intuitive product. It is beneficial for professionals and beginners to make use of such extensive technologies while writing and testing codes.
