In one sentence: Node.js shines in real-time web applications employing push technology over websockets. What is so revolutionary about that? Well, after over 20 years of stateless-web based on the stateless request-response paradigm, we finally have web applications with real-time, two-way connections, where both the client and server can initiate communication, allowing them to exchange data freely. This is in stark contrast to the typical web response paradigm, where the client always initiates communication. Additionally, it’s all based on the open web stack (HTML, CSS and JS) running over the standard port 80.
Still, Node.js is no silver bullet; in fact it has some real weaknesses -- for instance in CPU-intensive operations and other heavy computation. Find out why Node.js is becoming a go-to platform for some kinds of web development, and why in some cases you still might want to choose another option, like Java.
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