Not just for building web servers!

Node.js is not just to write JavaScript in the server-side. Yes, we have discussed this point earlier. Node.js sets up the environment for the JavaScript code to work anywhere it can be installed. It can be a powerful solution to create command-line tools, as well as fully featured, locally run applications that have nothing to do with the web or a browser. Grunt.js is a great example of a Node-powered command-line tool that many web developers use daily to automate tasks such as build processes, compiling CoffeeScript, launching Node.js servers, running tests, and more.

In addition to command-line tools, Node.js is increasingly popular among the hardware crowd with the Node.js bots movement. Johnny-Five and Cylon.js are two popular Node.js libraries that exist to provide a framework to work with robotics. Just search on YouTube for Node.js robots and you will see a lot of examples. Also, there is a chance that you might be using a text editor developed on Node.js. GitHub's open source editor named Atom, which is hugely popular, is an example.