SaaS companies develop applications over the internet and charge a minimal service fee. As companies adopt digital transformation and establish a web presence, the need for SaaS products is increasing. SaaS products are agile and need high-performant languages to power them, and what’s better than NodeJS? NodeJS provides excellent features and native cloud support, the primary need for all SaaS products.
As we advance in this article, we will understand some of the remarkable reasons driving the high adoption of NodeJS language in SaaS products. But first, let’s start with a brief introduction to the NodeJS language.
What is NodeJS?
NodeJS is a server-side JavaScript scripting framework built upon the Chrome V8 engine. It was developed and open-sourced by Ryan Dahl when the idea of using JavaScript in the backend to power mobile and web applications struck his mind. Since its launch, the language has been widely adopted, and developers love to use it for all web and mobile development projects. Its superb features make it the first choice for developing high-performance and scalable SaaS applications.
Knowing the language, let’s look at the top five reasons why NodeJS is getting popular in SaaS development.
5 Reasons NodeJS In SaaS Development is Getting Popular
Same Language Across The Project
NodeJS is based on JavaScript; anyone with significant knowledge can work on a NodeJS project. While it is used primarily for backend development, it is not confined to only true backend developers. A frontend developer who is updated with the latest JavaScript frameworks, and ES6 changes, can easily work on NodeJS with little vetting.
You can swap code between client and server apps when utilizing Node.js, and you can utilize JavaScript throughout the development process, allowing for better collaboration between backend and frontend teams. This also simplifies and makes full-stack development more accessible since you no longer need to recruit fluent experts in many programming languages.
NodeJS also provides options to work with TypeScript, a statically typed language. Statically typed languages provide a way to find errors before runtime, and variables have their own defined types, which lead to lesser errors.
Node Package Manager
The Node Package Manager is one of the main reasons why SaaS organizations prefer NodeJS. Because SaaS firms operate in shorter and faster product development iterations, they cannot afford to spend too much time designing tiny, low-level components. Instead, they all imported packages and modules from the open-source ecosystem.
You can use NPM to download and use code packages created and open-sourced by other project developers. Consequently, you won’t need to write as much code from the start.
NPM is one of the largest and deepest open-source code repositories. Almost anything you plan to implement from scratch is already in the NPM repositories. All you have to do is understand your problems well and find the best node module to solve them without diving deeper. You can install the module and integrate it with your codebase in simple steps, and you are good to go.
NPM also provides excellent support regarding documentation and updates for the packages. You can install the package, which will automatically install all its dependencies, saving significant configuration time in production. Moreover, a single command can update all the node modules to the latest versions, and you’ll enjoy the latest updates and features in no time.
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Single Threaded and Event Loop Architecture
Node.js is well-known for its single-threaded event loop architecture, which makes it perfect for microservices. When a Node.js application starts, it initializes the event loop and executes one instruction at a time.
All requests are serviced linearly as they arrive for execution due to the single-threaded method. Furthermore, it alleviates the developer’s burden of maintaining many threads, deadlocks, and race situations inside the system.
NodeJS also has the non-blocking IO model under its single-threaded and event-loop architecture. This unique IO model ensures the main thread is never stuck and always available to accept new requests. NodeJS smartly pushes the IO operations on the sides, letting them continue and return for execution upon completion. In the meantime, it goes ahead and handles newer requests and linearly executes them.
Due to the never-blocking IO and single-threaded execution policy, NodeJS works exceptionally well with real-time SaaS products and provides real-time data processing and transferring capabilities. Moreover, this model makes the language the first choice for every SaaS product, where performance is prioritized.
Minimal Rendering Time
The rendering time you offer on your web pages to each visitor is critical to the user experience you deliver. By utilizing Node JS for SaaS online apps, you may deliver pre-rendered views to users, making the entire experience seamless by reducing loading time.
Server-side rendering is a rendering policy where the pages can be rendered with everything on the server, and the created page can be transferred to the client side for display purposes. Due to this approach, the client-side resources are not used at all, and there is no dependency on client-side resources too. This significantly reduces your page’s rendering time, boosting the user experience.
When using client-side rendering, the app’s performance depends on how well the client-side’s execution and other resources are, but that is eliminated by using NodeJS and the server-side rendering policy.
JavaScript is one of the most loved and understood programming and scripting languages. It is known by almost every developer with formal and informal training. It is easier to learn, which carries on to the frameworks like NodeJS, React, etc.
Due to these reasons, the industry has a high supply of JavaScript and NodeJS developers. As you know, when the supply is high, you get too many choices to opt from, making hiring the right developers easy.
As SaaS companies need expert developers, it is easy to hire NodeJS developers because of the excellent supply of high-quality developers.
Conclusion:
In the end, if you are building a SaaS app, NodeJS is the best thing to start with. The language is scalable and will help you scale and serve effortlessly as your popularity grows. We also discovered why it is getting popular in SaaS development; and you should try it out to find out even more reasons to stick with the language.
