Every few years, new trends make way to a completely different environment for Web Developers. It may be is marked by static websites, another by the innovation in responsiveness, and it goes as far as integrating chatbots to the websites. Apart from the creative designs, one can portray through the development, the lucrative career that comes with it is hard to resist.
According to a report, Full-Stack Development is the fifth most in-demand job for the year 2020. They can find job opportunities in software companies, financial service companies, digital marketing companies, and many other companies that maintain web applications. Thus, if you have the required skillset and get timely updates to your career as a web developer is expected to keep growing onwards and upwards.
How is Web development categorised?
Primarily, web development can be split into three as front-end, back-end and full-stack development depending on the type of role that you do. These three separate career paths are related to each other but serve different purposes. Front-end developers or client-end developers are programmers that codes and
creates the visual front-end elements of an application that has computing components/features that are directly viewable and accessible by the end-user or client back-end development is when a developer deals with the back end of programs back-end developers predominantly deal with the functionality of sites and
databases where the data gets stored and accessed later.
A full-stack developer is simply a hybrid of front-end and back-end, that is, they work with both the front end and back-end technologies They can tackle projects that involve everything from databases to designing user-facing websites.
Keeping that in mind, let’s understand the two most sort-out technologies, i.e., AngularJS and NodeJS, used by web developers of all three categories and look at their differences.
What is AngularJS and NodeJS – the key difference?
Apart from their dependency on JavaScript, Angular and Node are two completely different technologies that have been developed for different uses. AngularJS is an open-source front-end web structural framework for developing dynamic web apps. Developers can use HTML as the template language and AngularJS lets the
syntax to express the components of the application briefly but clearly.
NodeJS, on the other hand, is a cross-platform, runtime environment that executes JavaScript code outside a web browser and enables JavaScript to run on the server-side as well. Applications are written by JavaScript in NodeJS. The abundant libraries available in NodeJS simplifies the web development process.
Key Features of AngularJS:
- AngularJS uses POJO that stands for Plain Old JavaScript Objects.
- It used for analysing data flow and it is not bound to any restrictions.
- Through the POJO model in Angular, developers were able to monitor the flow of data easily unlike other models.
- The loops created in POJO helps developers by providing clear code to build customer-friendly applications.
Key Features of NodeJS:
- NodeJS is a cross-Platform and is Object-Oriented.
- This specifies that Node.js can benefit from the four main pillars of OOP, that is, polymorphism, encapsulation, inheritance and abstraction.
- It helps developers to execute the correct structure with the required dependencies.
Scope of Front-End Development:
The words front-end and back-end play a major key here as they are considered to be completely different technologies for different purposes. The job opportunities for a front-end developer and back-end developer are versatile in every aspect from demand to the technologies one would be working with. AngularJS is an open-source and front-end web framework that is used to develop single-page applications. That means, the user interface of an application that you see on a web page is the work of AngularJS with the help of HTML and CSS. It is developed and maintained by Google for nine years from its initial release date.
NodeJS is a runtime environment, that is, a server-side platform built on Google Chrome’s JavaScript Engine (V8 Engine). Node.js is an ideal technology for developing server-side, data-intensive, scalable web apps. One of the major benefits that NodeJS developers enjoy is that it allows them to use the same language for both their front-end and back-end needs, helping them maintain the same coding pattern all through.
One or Multiple frameworks?
A major difference is the frameworks each technology deals with. Since AngularJS is a JavaScript framework itself, it doesn’t have any other frameworks associated with it. However, It has a rich standard library that provides a collection of custom extensions. Through this Developers can create and share general solutions for particular domains and use them in different applications.
On the other hand, NodeJS is powered by multiple, robust frameworks for different usage and purposes like Sails.js, Partial.js, and Express.js. A framework can help you work with a set of tools, and guidelines. This helps you save time by eliminating the need to write a lot of repetitive code that might be used in other applications.
Installation process – is it time-consuming?
Every developer’s dread is the time it may take to install software or requirements needed for a particular technology. This may be time-consuming if the dependencies are not properly dealt with before the installation process and lead to hours of installing different libraries that support the main software or
environment.
Applications that are developed with NodeJS need to run within the runtime environment on various platforms like Linux, Windows, and macOS. This prompts the developers to install NodeJS on their computers. Developers can directly install and run NodeJS from nodejs.org website.
AngularJS, just like any other framework, doesn’t require any installation. It can be added to an HTML page with a script tag and can be edited using a regular code editor.
Working with Data
Since JavaScript is used to write database queries for various databases like MongoDB, CouchDB, Node.js is quite useful for generating database queries. This reduces the developer’s task as they don’t need to remember the syntactical differences and ease the task of creating database queries for the non-relational
databases.
Almost all other frameworks usually implement MVC for rapid and parallel development by splitting an app into MVC components. Angular is also one of those frameworks that supports two-way data binding and keeps the data between a web application’s model and view components synchronised
automatically.
Programming Paradigm: How many languages should I learn?
NodeJs could extend the functionalities of JavaScript to more than just making websites interactive. This means that you can use JavaScript on the client as well as the server and enjoy all of its benefits while focusing on learning one language.
Angular JS primarily uses TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript. So if you’re already familiar with JavaScript, then you need not worry too much about learning a new language to use Angular since TypeScript is JavaScript plus some other added features. Developers need to have a deep understanding of prototyping, scope and various other JavaScript aspects.
Apart from JavaScript, both AnuglarJS and NodeJS support many programming languages. AngularJS supports CoffeeScript, TypeScript, and Dart whereas NodeJS uses Ruby, CoffeeScript, and TypeScript.
Read the difference between TypeScript and JavaScript, here.
Other key highlights:
While developing a web page, it is essential to analyse your requirements and figure out if it is a small-scale or a large-scale project. This helps you to identify your needs and choose a platform that caters to it. AngularJS is heavily used for medium and high-level app development projects while NodeJS is preferred for small size projects that don’t require CPU intense computations.
Angular JS is better used for real-time applications as it eliminates the need for polling and getting updates to your application’s data when they happen instead of having a time delay. This makes it more responsive and useful without significant optimisation efforts. This makes it best for messaging applications, video and audio streaming platforms.
NodeJS is highly scalable and faster as it is capable of handling a huge number of simultaneous connections with high throughput. Therefore, NodeJS is predominately used to develop applications that have heavy client-side rendering, multiple concurrent requests, and frequent shuffling of data from a client to a server.
To wrap it up, both are open-source technologies whose prime motive is to build a web application easily using JavaScript. At the same time, their architecture and working model is quite different. One of the biggest benefits of AngularJS its compelling features including templating, two-way binding, modularisation.
NodeJS offers easy scalability and can be scaled horizontally by the addition of additional nodes to the existing system. In end the, like it always goes, you need to explore based on what your app build requires; the choice is up to you.
Liked reading this article, check out more here.
