When to use Node.js

You may have heard of this proverb by an american psychologist, Abraham Maslow:

This makes a lot of sense in this context. Node.js is not a technology to depend for on all the application problems that you intend to solve, and if not chosen wisely, the decision to use it will backfire. Node.js is well suited for applications that are expected to handle a huge amount of concurrent connections. Also, it should be noted, it is most suited for applications where each incoming request requires very few CPU cycles. This means that if you intend to do computation-intensive tasks upon request, it will end up blocking the event loop, thereby impacting other requests concurrently processed by the web server. Node.js is well suited for real-time web applications, such as chat rooms, collaboration tools, online games, and so on. So, when deciding whether or not to use Node.js, we should analyze the application context seriously and figure out whether Node.js really suits the context of the application.

As we have briefly gone through the concept and features of Node.js, now let's look into the NoSQL and MongoDB side.