Node is often described as “JavaScript on the server”, but that doesn’t quite do it justice. In fact, any description of Node.js I can offer will be unfairly reductionist, so let me start with the one provided by the Node team:
“Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine.” (Source)
That’s a fine description, but it kinda needs a picture, doesn’t it? If you look on the Node.js website, you’ll notice there are no high-level diagrams of the Node.js architecture. Yet, if you search for “Node.js architecture diagram” there are approximately 178 billion different diagrams that attempt to paint an overall picture of Node (I’ll refer to Node.js as Node from now on). After looking at a few of them, I just didn’t see one that fit with the way I’ve structured the material in this course, so I came up with this:
Figure 1. The Node.js architecture stack
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