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How Does Node.JS Work As Opposed To PHP?

I'm thinking of switching from PHP to using Node.js for developing my website. However, after researching Node.js for a little while, I can't seem to find exactly how to write a w

Solution 1:

You don't necessarily need to use response.write for each line of the view, you can use template engines as well. Search for "node.js template engines". At first impression it could seem tedious, but a similar approach prevents you from writing bad code.


Solution 2:

PHP is a scripting language, node is a platform built on javascript.


To start web development using node.js, at first you have to understand what makes node different. Node gives you a way to make async calls to your database (which is a very simplified explanation), which you can then wrap in nice html and send (route) it to the browser. Alternatively, you can use something like angular.js in the frontend and use node.js to make db requests and response which is picked up by angular.js which updates the front html. If you like the idea of Single page app with async calls to fetch data, use node with angular. The tutorial that I like is https://scotch.io/tutorials/creating-a-single-page-todo-app-with-node-and-angular Hope this helps!


Solution 3:

As others have answered, there exist templating engines for Node. With the current trends in web development, most modern web frameworks encourage the separation of code from the view (or the HTML you deliver to the client). For instance, Ruby's ERB templates, Jinja2 in Python, Handlebars/Jade for Node, and now a lot of modern PHP frameworks support this as well (Zend/Slim).

Another main difference is in how they work and how the languages are designed. PHP is an object oriented language supporting classes, inheritance, member visibility, interfaces, etc. Node.js is Javascript, so using prototypical inheritance.

The communities and ecosystems are different as well. Modern PHP tends to embrace the use of the Composer package manager, and that came after PEAR. However, npm is the official node package manager and it is deeply integrated with the platform. It is trivial to search for new packages and then use them in your projects.

The main architectural difference is that Node is also asynchronous by design, meaning it runs in a single thread and can potentially handle much more connections than PHP on systems with limited memory. When a request comes in to a PHP application, all the services/controllers and everything you defined have to be reinstatiated, you define PHP files and let Apache/Nginx process them. In Node you have a node process which you can proxy outside requests to.


Solution 4:

Node.js Provides so many modules to do these things there is framework called express for node.js http://expressjs.com/ You can use a templating engine and create views. some examples are like ejs or jade. It doesnt have to be a string.


Solution 5:

PHP is very strongly orientated towards creating web pages from a template, while Node.js is lower-level and broader in scope. A very rough overview of the differences between PHP and Node.js:

  • In PHP, you'd start a web server (almost certainly Apache), and then put a PHP file in a directory where you want to serve something from. You might use some fancy .htaccess directives to make URLs nicer, etc.
  • In Node.js you create a script, in which you use the http module to start a web server, and then you supply a callback for whenever a request is made to your server. Deciding which page to respond to the request with, etc, is all your work to do.

In PHP, things like routing a request to a particular PHP file, compression, decoding POST and GET variables, are all done by using Apache - your PHP files are sort of just like templates which Apache runs whenever a request is received. In Node.js, everything, from starting the server to sending HTML, is all done within your Node.js script - you have to do everything.

HTML isn't the first class citizen in Node.js that it is PHP. Generally, in Node.js you are just sending strings to the client. There are plenty of third party templating tools for Node.js - but they will be dependencies, not builtin functions.


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