For anyone who is familiar with basic HTML development, JavaScript is a language restricted to the browser. For a long time, this was indeed the case, until 2009, when the first release of Node.js was written.

Node.js is a runtime for JavaScript, based on Chrome V8 engine, which allows JavaScript to run outside the browser. This gives it huge potential to do things it was never able to do inside the browser, such as:

• Reading and writing files on the system
• Binding to a port and running a server
• Making native system calls and interacting with other processes

We are eventually going to make use of all three of these functions to build our final application. Node has gained huge popularity both in the Enterprise and the IoT space because of its event-driven and non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient.