Last month me and my team has developed E-commerce website on electronics shopping and the first challenge we face was: what technology should we choose? Spring Boot or Node.js. It was really tough to choose one because both have their own pros and cons.
First let’s learn some fundamentals of both the technologies.
Spring Boot
Spring Boot is a platform that makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can “just run”.
Key Features :
- It has a lot of default functions which help you to create Spring application faster.
- Comes with embedded HTTP servers like Jetty and Tomcat to test web applications.
- Helps to avoid all the manual work of writing boilerplate code, annotations, and complex XML configurations.
- It increases productivity as you can create Spring application quickly.
- Allows for easily connecting with database and queue services like Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB.
Node.js
Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, back-end JavaScript runtime environment that runs on the V8 engine and executes JavaScript code outside a web browser.
Key Features :
- Helps to build fast real-time, high-traffic apps.
- It makes it possible to code in JavaScript for both the client and server side.
- Node.js increases the efficiency of the development process as it fills the gap between frontend and backend developers.
- The ever-growing NPM (Node Package Manager) gives developers multiple tools and modules to use, thus further boosting their productivity.
- Easy knowledge sharing within a team.
- A huge number of free tools.
Which is better?
This was the question my team has to tackle. It was tough 🙁
Let’s end the suspense. We choose Node.js over Spring Boot.
We come to know as with the numbers for web apps increasing by the day, complexities also have increased, and that If we have to build high performance website in no time without complications then we have to go with Node.js.
Let’s understand this in detail.
There are several points I like to discuss so you can understand why we choose Node.js
1. Input / Output Model
I/O model is the process of displaying the data by the computer. It is of two types, blocking and non-blocking. Blocking refers to a thread that can’t do anything until the entire I/O is fully received. While Non-Blocking refers to a thread that does not wait for other requests, it just perform any way and shows the result. Node.js is a Non-Blocking model which helps in memory utilization and It can send several requests at the same time.
2. Concurrency
For enterprise web applications, high concurrency is required. As Java Spring is multi-threaded, it requires a thread for each request, and it becomes expensive as it demands many threads to achieve full concurrency. While the Node.js is single-threaded, the CPU will be busy when it is operating on full load and OS will not break down until the request is serviced.
3. Popularity
Do you know? Most popular company using Node.js is Netflix. Why Netflix using it anyway? Netflix is so popular that over 1 million users watch movies, series on Netflix per hour and that means to much load on on server. So, they needed the technology which is simple and flexible to handle, so if somehow system fails, engineers can be able to handle errors fast.
Other companies using Node.js for same reason are Uber, LinkedIn, Medium, PayPal, NASA, eBay.
4. Community
Based on last point we can see JavaScript has very large community on StackOverflow and other related websites. which makes it easier to tackle some complications.
By keeping all these points in our mind we choose Node.js. But It does not mean I hate Spring Boot or Spring Boot is not better than Node.js. It is totally depend on software requirement and your teams mindset. Let me know your thoughts in comment section below.
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