The capabilities of Node

Node is a platform for writing JavaScript applications outside web browsers. This is not the JavaScript we are familiar with in web browsers! There is no DOM built into Node, nor any other browser capability, but a DOM can be added using JSDom, and there are Node-based wrappers available for some browser engines. Between the JavaScript language and its asynchronous I/O framework, it is a powerful application development platform.

Beyond its native ability to execute JavaScript, the bundled modules provide the following capabilities:

The network layer of Node is low level while being simple to use. For example, the HTTP modules allow you to write an HTTP server (or client) in a few lines of code. This is powerful, but it puts you, the programmer, very close to the protocol requests and makes you implement precisely which HTTP headers to return in request responses. Where a PHP programmer generally doesn't care about the headers, a Node programmer does.

In other words, it's very easy to write an HTTP server in Node, but the typical web application developer doesn't need to work at that level of detail. For example, PHP coders assume Apache is already there, and that they don't have to implement the HTTP server portion of the stack. The Node community has developed a wide range of web application frameworks, such as Connect, allowing developers to quickly configure an HTTP server that provides all of the basics we've come to expect—sessions, cookies, serving static files, logging, and so on—thus letting developers focus on their business logic.