Node.js Community Support - How Your Web Application Can Benefit from Node.js

It will speed up your software development, make it error-proof, connect you with the best specialists, and even help you promote your product and services.

We live in a connected global society. While we make friends with people from other continents, the links between professionals and specialists are also getting stronger, since competence is valued everywhere.

Software developers are no exception. As any other engineers, they are practical people, and they don’t want to waste any time. When they face a problem, their first step would usually be to visit Stack Overflow, the largest forum for developers, just in case someone has already answered their question. If the answer is not there, they will try to post their own question. Somebody will pick it up and write a useful reply, which will be quickly reviewed and graded by others. Finally, if this doesn’t happen, the programmer will work out the solution on their own, and post the answer for the benefit of the community later.

It’s a reasonably straightforward, yet very powerful process. It is crucial that you choose for your project a technology that has a healthy community. JavaScript and Node.js have the most prominent and most active community of all contemporary software technologies.

Each year, Stack Overflow a forum where developers talk about their favourite technologies, education, experience, job preferences, and more conducts a survey among its users. Over 100,000 people took part in this year’s study. For the sixth straight year, they declared JavaScript as the most commonly used programming language. Nearly 70 percent of 78,334 respondents stated they used JavaScript, which is more than HTML and CSS (68.5 and 65.1 per cent accordingly).

Node.js is by far the most popular technology in the “Frameworks, Libraries, and Tools” category. Almost 50 percent out of 51,620 respondents declared they used Node.js, with Angular and React coming second and third with 37 percent and 28 percent of votes respectively.

It is of no surprise, then, that most questions and answers posted on Stack Overflow concern JavaScript. This means massive crowdsourced resources for anybody using this technology, and especially Node.js as a backend framework.

Any question you ask will reach half of the global community of developers. The answer will most likely come up within minutes. If there’s something wrong with the suggested solution – it’s incomplete or works around the simplest way to do it – the community will quickly correct it.

This is a proven problem-solving process that will improve the efficiency and quality of your product development. As a result, the community support will have a direct impact on your web application. It will drive its value and increase its competitive advantage as open developer forums like StackOverflow are the source of the finest programming resources.

An active community not only means precise answers given fast but also ready-to-use solutions. Every service provider puts JavaScript and Node.js APIs at the top of their to-do list. Even if they don’t provide a convenient Software Development Kit (SDK), you will very likely find a software package or reusable code you can use. Just search through unofficial releases or ask the community directly. You can also use the npm package manager to find the JavaScript and Node.js solutions you are looking for. The project praises itself for being the world’s largest software registry.

Both JavaScript and Node.js are trending right now. Their popularity is growing. Large tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Netflix or Amazon placed an important bet on Node.js environment and made significant contributions by sharing their know-how on Serverless, building microservices architecture and by distributing many Open Source ready to use solutions. Being supported by tech giants and by the largest developer community means this technology will be used in the foreseeable future and will get better, more efficient, and have more applications with time.

Having JavaScript running on both server and browser has already significantly shortened the distance between front-end and back-end developers, allowing them to contribute to shared utility libraries and packages. This made Node.js environment an obvious choice for full-stack teams implementing React server-side rendering or real-time apps based on websockets.

The community has brought solutions such as Electron, an open-source framework that lets you create native desktop applications for Windows, macOS, and Linux with the use of Node.js and Chromium web browser. It means that if you have your app written in JavaScript, you can use the same code to provide users with a native experience on each of the leading desktop platforms. This approach was used by creators of Slack, Skype, Spotify and Visual Studio Code, just to name a few.

Interacting with people in the community will not only help you build a better product but also get in touch with the most active and renowned engineers from all around the world. It is also an excellent way of promoting your product or services. If the members of your team are active in the JavaScript and Node.js community, it speaks volumes about your organization’s competence.

The developer community can be beneficial for your business. Just remember to choose the technology which is and will be used by many competent specialists all around the world. The rest is just working together and enjoying writing code and building software with tools that work better with every problem solved.