Benefit of using Node JS in existing application

Question

I'm new in Node JS and I got a question for you.

What benefit is it to use node JS when you have a existing application?

The existing application is asp.net mvc with bootstrap and jquery in frontend.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Node.js is a programming environment on its own. If you already have a working app in another programming environment, you would generally not use node.js for that project unless you needed to run some third party code that only runs in node.js and you needed to somehow incorporate that into your existing app.

To do that, you'd probably create a separate app using node.js that used the desired node.js library and then communicate between that new app and your main app using TCP networking of some form (e.g. http, webSockets, etc...). As an example, let's say you needed to do some image recognition in some photos and the image recognition library you wanted to use only ran in node.js (and, for whatever reason, you weren't going to use a different library that ran in your existing asp.net). Then, you'd create a new app that could do the image recognition portion and you'd figure out how to communicate between the node.js app and the main asp.net application.

Otherwise, if you already have an existing app and aren't contemplating throwing it away and switching to another programming environment, then you probably wouldn't use node.js for that project.

When starting a brand new project, you could more thoroughly consider the needs of the new project and evaluate that against several different programming environments (including node.js) to see which might be the best match for you to use.

For lots of general reasons to use node.js for a new project see this:

How to decide when to use Node.js?

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FYI, your question about when to use node.js in an existing asp.net project is probably fairly similar to when to incorporate Python or Ruby or Perl or PHP into an ASP.NET project. The answer is when you find you have some already done code that runs only in some other environment and you want to use that existing code without rewriting it to fit your current environment.