The Ultimate Guide to NodeJS Developer Tools
Ever since its debut in 2009, NodeJS has been impressing businesses and developers alike. This JavaScript runtime environment produces dynamic web applications for businesses, while making app development a hassle-free process for developers.
No wonder, a report published by Statista early in 2020 revealed that NodeJS was the most used framework among developers, with 51.4% respondents voting in its favor.
In this blog post, we’ve collated some of the best and commonly used NodeJS developer tools that you can contemplate for creating scalable, user-friendly applications.
Express is one of the fundamental back-end web frameworks used for NodeJS app development. Highly flexible, simplistic and lightweight in nature, it enables developers to build a variety of web apps and APIs in the shortest possible time.
Express has many unique features such as an advanced routing mechanism for client requests, a middleware for providing accurate responses to client requests and templating engines for developing dynamic content on web pages.
Considered as the “next-generation web framework of NodeJS”, Koa is the brainchild of ExpressJS developers. Designed to be smaller and more expressive, this tool handles errors efficiently by eliminating callbacks with the help of async functions.
No middleware is bundled in Koa and it consists of a number of plug-in packages for performing tasks like compression, caching, routing, etc. Due to its lightweight and modular structure, it is best suited for developing complex web applications.
A full stack NodeJS-based platform, TotalJS is used to build diverse applications of varying complexity ranging from simple web apps to high-quality video streaming apps as well as IoT and eCommerce apps.
It provides a large repository of libraries, UI components, packages and best practices that quicken app development process and makes developer’s job easy. TotalJS apps exhibit superior performance and easy scalability, and the maintenance costs are also less.
Keystone is another fully featured Express-based framework, that creates database-driven websites, apps and APIs in NodeJS. It basically serves as a CMS platform with support for both PostgreSQL and MongoDB databases.
A striking feature of Keystone is its auto-generated Admin UI that smoothly manages data based on the defined schema. Keystone also provides a GraphQL API for generating useful CRUD-related queries that eventually saves developer’s time.
If you are planning to develop a customized, enterprise-level NodeJS web app or a data-driven API, then try SailsJS. It’s a cross-platform, real-time MVC framework built atop NodeJS and ExpressJS.
It helps in the quick auto-generation of RESTful APIs, regardless of the database being employed. Sails is compatible with all the major front-end frameworks; it also supports WebSockets via Socket.io.
An event-driven JavaScript-based framework, Socket.io facilitates bi-directional communication between web clients and servers in real-time. It is known for its flawless speed and reliability, and due to its event-driven nature, it is ideally suited for NodeJS apps.
Its main features include auto-reconnection support, disconnection detection (using timers), binary support (for emitting serializable data structures) and multiplexing support (enables the creation of Namespaces).
A product of Walmart Labs, Electrode is a powerful platform for building universal React and NodeJS web and mobile applications. It focuses primarily on reusing code, following best practices and adopting standardized structures for scalable app development, maintaining high app performance and reducing time-to-market.
Electrode has three main components for developers – the Core, for creating the basic structure of an app, Modules for executing complex tasks, and Tools for discovering reusable components and optimizing JS bundles.
PM2 is a simple, easy-to-use process manager that helps in managing NodeJS apps in the production environment. It has a host of features like load balancing, hot reloading, keymetrics monitoring, cluster mode support, to name a few.
PM2 allows developers to monitor an application’s vital aspects like resource usage, memory threshold, speed, etc. and quickly reloads the app (with zero downtime) when a sudden crash occurs.
Mocha is a simple, but feature-rich test framework that allows for asynchronous testing of NodeJS apps in both the server and the browser. It runs in a specific pattern and ensures that the test cases are executed independently.
An important characteristic of MochaJS is that it can be paired with any assertion libraries such as Chai, ShouldJS, ExpectJS,etc.
Conclusion
To sum it up, each of the above mentioned tools and frameworks are outstanding in their own right and can be tried out for your upcoming projects in 2021.
Now, if you are a business owner planning to develop a robust app, then hire the best NodeJS developers who are proficient in working with all these tools.
Over a decade, we’ve assisted 250+ companies in delivering more than 350+projects. Contact us today at the Scalans office number or you may use online contact form.
I worked with Scalans on two major web app rebranding projects, both were highly customized. Both sites turned out great, they kept up to date and stayed on deadlines. I would recommend Scalans for anyone doing upgrade that has a clear path of what they want and need.
★★★★★
