Navigating through the landscape of real-time collaboration apps presents a number of challenges, regardless of whether one is dealing with a simple chat app or a complex collaborative board. Node.js faces several challenges in the context of real-time collaboration apps, particularly around synchronization , latency , conflict resolution , and scalability . Its single-threaded nature can lead to bottlenecks under CPU-intensive tasks, potentially worsening latency issues and complicating synchronization of user activities in real-time. When it comes to conflict resolution , the platform does not provide built-in mechanisms, requiring developers to implement these features manually, which can be error-prone and inefficient. Regarding scalability , while Node.js handles a large number of simultaneous connections well, its performance can degrade under the computational demands of complex collaborative environments. Node.js also does not inherently offer offline support , which is critical for a seamless user experience in collaborative apps, necessitating additional solutions. Security in Node.js, crucial for collaborative apps, often demands extensive customization and additional modules, increasing development complexity. Resource optimization and ensuring cross-platform compatibility also pose challenges, as they can require a variety of additional tools and libraries to achieve efficient outcomes. This article dives deep into the reasons why Node.js may not measure up for real-time collaborative apps in certain use cases and suggests possible alternatives.

If you are running Webpack or a CLI tool that’s built on top of Webpack (e.g., react-scripts for Create React App applications or vue-cli-service for Vue applications) with version 17 of Node.js, then you may have come across the following error: With Node.js v17+ supporting OpenSSL 3.0 , algorithms like MD4 have been relegated to OpenSSL 3.0’s legacy provider. A provider is a collection of cryptographic algorithm implementations. OpenSSL 3.0 comes with five standard providers : default, legacy, FIPS, base and null. The legacy provider consists of algorithms that are considered to be rarely used in today’s world or unsafe security-wise. This provider exists for backwards compatibility purposes (for software that still rely on these algorithms) and is not loaded by default. Webpack creates hashes using the crypto.createHash() method of the Node.js crypto module. This method can only create hashes with algorithms that are available and supported by the version of OpenSSL corresponding to the currently installed Node.js version. Since Webpack specifies to the crypto.createHash() method to use the MD4 algorithm (see below code), and this algorithm is not readily available in Node.js v17+ due to OpenSSL 3.0 not loading legacy providers by default, Webpack errors out and Node.js logs the error message Error: error:0308010C:digital envelope routines::unsupported .

Over the past decade, many developers started their backend development journey with Node.js. What makes Node.js compelling to developers is the benefit of creating client-side and server-side applications with a single programming language: JavaScript. This convenience, along with the growing interest in frameworks written with modern programming languages like Golang and Rust, means more developers are less likely to branch out to older, more established technologies like ASP.NET. Developed and maintained by Microsoft, ASP.NET ( A ctive S erver P ages N etwork E nabled T echnologies) is a framework for creating dynamic web applications and services on the .NET platform . You can write ASP.NET applications with any .NET programming language: C#, F# or Visual Basic. ASP.NET is widely used across many industries, most notably, by large corporations and government agencies. Despite Microsoft's efforts to adapt ASP.NET to the rapidly evolving web development landscape, such as the release of ASP.NET MVC in 2009 in response to the popularity of MVC frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET continued to suffer from several limitations: To migrate away from ASP.NET's monolithic design, Microsoft re-implemented ASP.NET as a modular, cross-platform compatible, open-source framework named ASP.NET Core . Released in 2016 , ASP.NET Core comes with built-in support for dependency injection and provides...

When I am working on personal projects, I often find the need to setup an API that serves up data to my app or webpages. I get frustrated when I end up spending too much time on hosting and environment issues. These days what I end up doing is hosting the API using Cloud Functions for Firebase . It hits all my requirements: The official name is Cloud Functions for Firebase. In this article, I am going to call it Firebase Functions. This is mostly to distinguish it from Google's other serverless functions-as-a-service: Cloud Functions. You can read more about the differences here . From that page:

Web development is tough enough as it is, something as mundane as mismatched versions of Node in development versus production shouldn't be another thing you have to keep in mind. Volta can prevent this sort of issue and so much more for you and your dev team automatically, and it's easy to set up to boot. Read on to get started using it yourself.

npm centralizes third-party, open-source Node.js packages and libraries within a large, online registry. Contributing to the Node.js ecosystem involves no vetting process, which lets anyone publish packages to the npm registry with little effort. Not only has npm's short process for publishing packages led to the explosive growth of the Node.js ecosystem, but also fosters the development of various types of packages: front-end libraries/frameworks, tooling, bundlers, routers, state management, etc. However, this comes at the cost of more packages being released with more security vulnerabilities and less reliability. Despite these concerns, npm continues to introduce new features and statistics for helping developers identify high quality packages. A library author uses npm's command line client to publish their library's package to the npm registry and share it. Once published, npm allows developers to update their projects' dependencies with the latest version of this package or install this package within their projects. Below, I'm going to show you how to publish a package to the npm registry.

Serving a web application to a global audience requires deploying, hosting and scaling it on reliable cloud infrastructure. Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) that supports many server-side languages (e.g., Node.js, Go, Ruby and Python), monitors application status in a beautiful, customizable dashboard and maintaining an add-ons ecosystem for integrating tools/services such as databases, schedulers, search engines, document/image/video processors, etc. Although it is built on AWS, Heroku is simpler to use compared to AWS. Heroku automatically provisions resources and configures low-level infrastructure so developers can focus exclusively on their application without the additional headache of manually setting up each piece of hardware and installing an operating system, runtime environment, etc. When deploying to Heroku, Heroku's build system packages the application's source code and dependencies together with a language runtime using a buildpack and slug compiler to generate a slug , which is a highly optimized and compressed version of your application. Heroku loads the slug onto a lightweight container called a dyno . Depending on your application's resource demands, it can be scaled horizontally across multiple concurrent dynos. These dynos run on a shared host, but the dynos responsible for running your application are isolated from dynos running other applications. Initially, your application will run on a single web dyno, which serves your application to the world. If a single web dyno cannot sufficiently handle incoming traffic, then you can always add more web dynos. For requests exceeding 500ms to complete, such as uploading media content, consider delegating this expensive work as a background job to a worker dyno. Worker dynos process these jobs from a job queue and run asynchronously to web dynos to free up the resources of those web dynos.