
Node.js shines in real-time web applications
Node.js shines in real-time web applications employing push technology over websockets. What is so revolutionary about that? Well, after over 20 years of stateless-web based on the stateless request-response paradigm, we finally have web applications with real-time, two-way connections, where both the client and server can initiate communication, allowing them to exchange data freely. This is in stark contrast to the typical web response paradigm, where the client always initiates communication. Additionally, it’s all based on the open web stack (HTML, CSS and JS) running over the standard port 80.
Node.js is easily employed as a server-side proxy where it can handle a large amount of simultaneous connections in a non-blocking manner. It’s especially useful for proxying different services with different response times, or collecting data from multiple source points.