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Node.js for Everything

Lots of web applications using Javascript for front end for a long time. Javascript enabling people to build really really interactive great products, we can use Javascript on the front end and on the back end.

So, what do we do on the back end? Node.js is the answer. Here we'll see some of the npm packages that'll help us to enable Javascript in back end as well.

Load balancing is the main one when you plan to host your application server environment. Node offers pm2 package to easy your job. It's modern CLI process manager for Node apps with a builtin load-balancer.
npm install pm2@latest -g
pm2 start app.js

Next thing is running applications continuously. Yeah, we've a node package named forever. It's a simple CLI tool for ensuring that a given node script runs continuously.
npm install forever -g
forever start app.js

Enabling debugging in Javascript client applications are easy. Debugging a node application is sometimes a black box sometimes not, but one of the tools found very useful is called node inspector. Node inspector is a web inspector based debugger. This tool will enable us to put break point in server side code.
npm install node-inspector -g
node-debug app.js

For those using NPM today, please do not use asterisks. They will kill you in the future when trying to to update your applications, when putting those on different development machines, all of that will be a big deal in your future.
Using a specific version is recommended and coming up with the process on updating that version along the way.

"dependencies":{
"express":"*" //Not recommended
}

"dependencies":{
"express":"4.0" //Use proper versioning like this
}

The other big one is web applications use session data on a regular basis and if you can figure out a way around that having a stateless application is huge. It means that you can take that application, you can run it a number of times on a number of different servers and easily load balance across them. That means you've become an instantly scalable production level application. I know, that's not always the way it can be, therefore if you do have to use state and there's some great tools out there. Redis is one of those, Redis is a great in-memory storage solution that's is backed by disk, it's a great tool to get great performance out of carrying state across your application. There's a possibility to share session across multiple web applications, it makes it a nice quick easy thing.

So, when you go to build an API and it's one of the typical use cases in Node.js. Express is a great tool for building APIs. It is fast, unopinionated, easy, very simple to just build an API, build routes and return that data.
npm install express

HTTP Server framework, hapi is an newer version of an API framework.
npm install  hapi

REST framework, restify is very straightforward, quick, easy, get it done, have your API available type of thing all.
npm install  restify

Finally testing, it's not actually finally. From day one you should start test your code using some tools. Lot of tools available in Node., Pick one and use from day one.

Happy coding!
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