August 12, 2014

AngularJS VS NodeJS

In one way or another, we have all experienced the richness that traditional JavaScript has brought into our online web surfing. Almost anything related to web user interactivity sparkles, with awesome features like alert boxes, form validations, web page design aid, and so on. While today JavaScript has been “transformed” into an amalgamation of a great set of libraries and frameworks, it still provides high-end features that have never seen before in the JavaScript world.

NodeJS and AngularJS are the two most highly admirable pieces of work placed forward in the community. While NodeJS provides greater scalability and robustness, the AngularJS brings user interactivity to the next level. Let’s look at a rundown of AngularJS VS NodeJS.

AngularJS

Let’s first start with AngularJS. What is so amazing about the AngularJS framework?

According to AngluarJS.org, “Angular was built with the CRUD application in mind.” Additionally, data bindings provide a faster processing time, letting your application fetch only the content which is required directly on the page and not the entire content. Since it’s an MVC framework, it provides the traditional structure for MVC, however you won’t find controllers performing heavy work. For that, we have services, which consist of several modules that can be used on a need to basis. More importantly, AngularJS is built above DOM and JQuery, which greatly reduces the need to write extensive code to invoke or use DOM elements. The main idea behind AngularJS is its simplicity of usage, which resembles that of HTML quite closely. In fact, it operates within the HTML tags, making databinding extremely easy and more logical to place inside the application design. The main scope of usage is purely client-side interactivity.

NodeJS

Now, let’s see what NodeJS is, and why everyone is calling it the new trendsetter in the JavaScript territory.

NodeJS, commonly known as Node, is a Server side technology that is extremely powerful when accepting and processing HTTP calls. With its focus on network programming and providing assistance to run all kinds of socket Input/output request, it is becoming increasingly popular. Let’s look at some other impressive features that Node provides.

Node lets JavaScript run, but actually it does not consist of it. It is more of a platform that behaves like a processor, and successfully manages sockets & CRUD operations. With its built design based on ‘C,‘ it proves to be fast in executing processes. You must be wondering, if it is a server-side solution, then what kind of databases works with it? Node can be used with MongoDB, MySQL and Redis. However, the most powerful combination is with MongoDB.

Node handles beautifully and easily in all kinds of DB related operations, but especially working with JSON data that is being directly used by MongoDB as standard DB data protocol. So, amazingly it supports ‘NoSQL’, ‘Relational,’ and ‘Graph – Oriented’ Database model, which makes it quite versatile and provides a broad spectrum for different kinds of applications.

General Working Comparison

Another question that comes to mind: if AngularJS is a client side solution and Node is server side programming, then what are the capabilities that can be seen in both?

If we look at their capabilities and try to match the strengths of both frameworks, we will find the following things are identical:

Both AngularJS and Node supports multi- user systems.
Both have an interpreter to run and process the script.
Both support Unicode.
Each has an ORM support, making it very easy to use DB queries.
Each one of these can do multi-tasking.
Both have RESTful capability.
Both have built-in support for Injection Prevention and Openshift Paas support.
Both support Web-socket programming.
Dependency Injection is also available in both technologies.
Both support Ajax, Jquery, Package Manager, and Internationalization.

Despite these similarities, Node is way ahead in terms of scalability. I would like to point out a few important facts about both of these JavaScript frameworks. While AngularJS is a beauty with outstanding precision and power, it lacks the agility of Node in handling XML. Furthermore, in flexibility and out of the box implementation, Node has a superior lead. Both operate on ‘Realtime ‘and have JVM, still performance wise Node has the edge.

Which one to choose, which one has the edge?

The answer is: it all depends on your need. Node lacks personalization and is a little more difficult to learn than AngularJS. Apart from the learning curve, both have extensibility and both provide excellent support to your apps.

On a personal basis, I believe if you are looking for a high traffic application, are concerned with performance and reliability, want real-time server pushes with your JavaScript based application, and are less interested in design-end furnishing or interaction, then you will find Node to be your favorite tool of development.

Thank you for reading this far, I hope this article makes it easy for you to decide which of the frameworks is right for your needs.

Interested in what software development options Allshore has to offer your business?

References:

https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/introduction”>https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/introduction

http://vschart.com/compare/angularjs/vs/node-js”>http://vschart.com/compare/angularjs/vs/node-js

http://nodejs.org/

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/what-is-node.html

http://www.javaworld.com/article/2079190/scripting-jvm-languages/6-things-you-should-know-about-node-js.html