So, Let’s start with a story. From last 2 years I am working on JavaScript and developing web front end and I am enjoying it. Back end guys provide’s us some API’s written in Java,python (we don’t care) and we simply write a AJAX call, get our data and guess what ! we are done. But in real it is not that easy, If data we are getting is not correct or there is some server error then we stuck and we have to contact our back end guys over the mail or chat(sometimes on whatsApp too 🙂.) This is not cool. What if we wrote our API’s in JavaScript and call those API’s from our front end ? Yes that’s pretty cool because if we face any problem in API we can look into it. Guess what ! you can do this now , How ? – Node is there for you.
Ok agreed that you can write your API in JavaScript but what if I am ok with above problem. Do you have any other reason to use node for rest API ?
so here is the magic begins. Yes I do have other reasons to use node for our API’s.
Let’s go back to our traditional rest API system which is based on either blocking operation or threading. Suppose two concurrent request occurs( r1 and r2) , each of them require database operation. So In traditional system what will happens :
1. Waiting Way : Our server starts serving r1 request and waits for query response. after completion of r1 , server starts to serve r2 and does it in same way. So waiting is not a good idea because we don’t have that much time.
2. Threading Way : Our server will creates two threads for both requests r1 and r2 and serve their purpose after querying database so cool its fast.But it is memory consuming because you can see we started two threads also problem increases when both request is querying same data then you have to deal with deadlock kind of issues . So its better than waiting way but still issues are there.
Now here is , how node will do it:
3. Nodeway : When same concurrent request comes in node then it will register an event with its callback and move ahead it will not wait for query response for a particular request.So when r1 request comes then node’s event loop (yes there is an event loop in node which serves this purpose.) register an event with its callback function and move ahead for serving r2 request and similarly register its event with its callback. Whenever any query finishes it triggers its corresponding event and execute its callback to completion without being interrupted.
So no waiting, no threading , no memory consumption – yes this is nodeway for serving rest API.
nodeway 