Both the browser and Node use JavaScript as their programming language.
Building apps that run in the browser is a completely different thing than building a Node.js application.
Despite the fact that it’s always JavaScript, there are some key differences that make the experience radically different.
As a frontend developer who extensively uses Javascript, Node apps brings with it, a huge advantage - the comfort of programming everything, the frontend and the backend, in a single language.
You have a huge opportunity because we know how hard it is to fully, deeply learn a programming language, and by using the same language to perform all your work on the web - both on the client and on the server, you’re in a unique position of advantage.
What changes is the ecosystem.
In the browser, most of the time what you are doing is interacting with the DOM, or other Web Platform APIs like Cookies. Those do not exist in Node, of course. You don’t have the document, window and all the other objects that are provided by the browser.
And in the browser, we don’t have all the nice APIs that Node.js provides through its modules, like the filesystem access functionality.
Another big difference is that in Node.js you control the environment. Unless you are building an open source application that anyone can deploy anywhere, you know which version of Node you will run the application on. Compared to the browser environment, where you don’t get the luxury to choose what browser your visitors will use, this is very convenient.
This means that you can write all the modern ES6-7-8-9 JavaScript that your Node version supports.
Since JavaScript moves so fast, but browsers can be a bit slow and users a bit slow to upgrade, sometimes on the web, you are stuck to use older JavaScript / ECMAScript releases.
You can use Babel to transform your code to be ES5-compatible before shipping it to the browser, but in Node, you won’t need that.
Another difference is that Node uses the CommonJS module system, while in the browser we are starting to see the ES Modules standard being implemented.
In practice, this means that for the time being you use require() in Node and import in the browser.
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More node tutorials:
- An introduction to the npm package manager
- Introduction to Node.js
- HTTP requests using Axios
- Where to host a Node.js app
- Interact with the Google Analytics API using Node.js
- The npx Node Package Runner
- The package.json guide
- Where does npm install the packages?
- How to update Node.js
- How to use or execute a package installed using npm
- The package-lock.json file
- Semantic Versioning using npm
- Should you commit the node_modules folder to Git?
- Update all the Node dependencies to their latest version
- Parsing JSON with Node.js
- Find the installed version of an npm package
- Node.js Streams
- Install an older version of an npm package
- Get the current folder in Node
- How to log an object in Node
- Expose functionality from a Node file using exports
- Differences between Node and the Browser
- Make an HTTP POST request using Node
- Get HTTP request body data using Node
- Node Buffers
- A brief history of Node.js
- How to install Node.js
- How much JavaScript do you need to know to use Node?
- How to use the Node.js REPL
- Node, accept arguments from the command line
- Output to the command line using Node
- Accept input from the command line in Node
- Uninstalling npm packages with `npm uninstall`
- npm global or local packages
- npm dependencies and devDependencies
- The Node.js Event Loop
- Understanding process.nextTick()
- Understanding setImmediate()
- The Node Event emitter
- Build an HTTP Server
- Making HTTP requests with Node
- The Node fs module
- HTTP requests in Node using Axios
- Reading files with Node
- Node File Paths
- Writing files with Node
- Node file stats
- Working with file descriptors in Node
- Working with folders in Node
- The Node path module
- The Node http module
- Using WebSockets with Node.js
- The basics of working with MySQL and Node
- Error handling in Node.js
- The Pug Guide
- How to read environment variables from Node.js
- How to exit from a Node.js program
- The Node os module
- The Node events module
- Node, the difference between development and production
- How to check if a file exists in Node.js
- How to create an empty file in Node.js
- How to remove a file with Node.js
- How to get the last updated date of a file using Node.js
- How to determine if a date is today in JavaScript
- How to write a JSON object to file in Node.js
- Why should you use Node.js in your next project?
- Run a web server from any folder
- How to use MongoDB with Node.js
- Use the Chrome DevTools to debug a Node.js app
- What is pnpm?
- The Node.js Runtime v8 options list
- How to fix the "Missing write access" error when using npm
- How to enable ES Modules in Node.js
- How to spawn a child process with Node.js
- How to get both parsed body and raw body in Express
- How to handle file uploads in Node.js
- What are peer dependencies in a Node module?
- How to write a CSV file with Node.js
- How to read a CSV file with Node.js
- The Node Core Modules
- Incrementing multiple folders numbers at once using Node.js
- How to print a canvas to a data URL
- How to create and save an image with Node.js and Canvas
- How to download an image using Node.js
- How to mass rename files in Node.js
- How to get the names of all the files in a folder in Node
- How to use promises and await with Node.js callback-based functions
- How to test an npm package locally
- How to check the current Node.js version at runtime
- How to use Sequelize to interact with PostgreSQL
- Serve an HTML page using Node.js
- How to solve the `util.pump is not a function` error in Node.js