In February of 2009, Joyent software engineer Ryan Dahl unveiled a new programming framework that would allow developers to use JavaScript outside of a Web browser. Since then, Node.js has been picking up steam with a growing number of developers. “It just turns out that a lot of people like to program in JavaScript, and so there’s been a lot of interest from users to develop stuff,” said Dahl.
According to Dahl, the primary benefit of Node.js is “that it handles I/O very differently, so it doesn’t allow the user to lock up the program, ever. It keeps the user handling new things, so it’s very useful for network programming.” He added, “Ideally, it’s for servers where you’re juggling many connections, with a lot of I/O happening in the server.”
