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NodeJS is a JavaScript runtime environment for running JavaScript applications outside the browser environment. It’s asynchronous and event-driven, meaning it doesn't block the event loop - making NodeJS highly suitable for the development of server-side web applications. With around 50,000 open source packages available through npm (Node Package Manager), NodeJS facilitates the seamless backend extension. The GitHub repository has 99k stars and 27.5k forks demonstrating an active community.

Because of the asynchronous nature of Node.js, it's crucial you set timeouts to ensure the responsiveness of your application. Node.js timeouts help prevent indefinite waiting and let your backend handle situations where tasks take longer than expected. Thanks to timeouts, you can control the maximum duration allowed for incoming and outgoing requests. In this article, we'll look at the different types of timeouts and how to set them in vanilla Node.js and Express.

In November of 2014, when NodeSource was still a small consulting group, my teammates Dan Shaw, Rod Vagg, and I were having dinner after a customer engagement, discussing how to bring Node.js production deployments to the same level of polish and tooling capability of the other runtimes our customers were already employing.

Node.js v21, the latest Node update, is now available as a stable release. It supersedes v20 in the'Current' release line, which has been promoted to the long-term support (LTS) channel as of 24 October. This new version stabilizes the fetch and WebStreams API, adds a built-in WebSocket client, improves support for ES modules, and brings some notable performance improvements (as well as a customary update of Node.js dependencies such as V8).

As a developer, choosing the right Websocket Node library to integrate into your realtime application project can be a humbling experience. You are faced with a lot of choices that offer different capabilities and features that will allow you to build scalable and efficient applications. However, given the constantly changing landscape, a crucial question remains: have you selected the most suitable one? Are there other options that could enhance your project even more?

We are excited to share the release of our new Cost Calculator to showcase just how much the wrong APM provider can add to your cloud hosting costs (try it now). Observability is vital, but it comes with computational overhead that shares the same infrastructure as your application. This is compounded in typical Node.js APM tooling due to the internal workings of Node.js itself.

In the first part of this series, we built the asynchronous components of a much larger solution. Today, we will build the API interface that can be consumed in real-time.

Complex functionality can take a while to load. Users, in general, don't like to wait, so solutions must evolve. If you are already familiar with async/await in JavaScript, think of await as the place where blocking logically occurs. This forces the algorithm to wait, and technically, it's still synchronous code. Step functions allow long-running processes to run in the background asynchronously, so the logic does not get blocked and force people to wait.