Top 10 npm packages for Node.js framework

Node is a leader in the asynchronous framework market. The platform now supports a huge portion of startups and businesses that are earning hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Thus, it establishes itself as a platform that can sustain a huge load, whilst retaining smooth performance. Node.js was perhaps the biggest revelation of modern server engineering that we saw. By the looks of it, Node isn’t stopping any time soon; it’s the exact opposite. The project continues to push out frequent updates and maintains old releases to support older platforms. A new release secures some loopholes in OpenSSL, but also adds more support for languages like C and C++.

Starting with Node.js is a fairly easy process; the guidelines are outlined and thousands of projects are sitting on GitHub, waiting for you to inspect and analyze their architecture. Node.js works great on all platforms, even on Windows 10, for those who are interested. That makes it a truly great platform to begin learning front-end and back-end development together. Let’s not forget that Node has the most populated package manager of any framework or language known to man. Thus, building a website takes only a couple of minutes, thanks to the modules and libraries that are available through the package manager(NPM). So let’s get started with the topmost packages of nodeJS.

Express

All common programming languages share similar structures in the way things are built. One of the fastest ways to get a programming language to serve your needs is through a framework. Express is the leading Node.js framework for quickly creating and publishing applications and APIs. The framework’s minimal structure allows any Node.js developer to quickly launch a functional application with the use of Express Generator. Express gives you a solid outline to build your apps on top of. Combine it with any of the other packages we will discuss, and you will quickly realize just how amazing this framework truly is.

PM2

Node.js is known for being the framework to use for scaling large applications, and infrastructure. Process management should be an essential priority for any Node.js user. PM2 offers both process management for production applications, and a load-balancer to help with any possible performance tweaks. With PM2, your applications stay online indefinitely, giving you the tools to reload apps without having to experience any sort of downtime. Is it a surprise that hundreds of thousands of Node.js users consider this an essential tool to have?

Mocha

Even more asynchronous action going on here in this Node.js package roundup, this time we have Mocha – a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on Node.js and the browser, making asynchronous testing simple and fun. Mocha tests run serially, allowing for flexible and accurate reporting, while mapping uncaught exceptions to the correc t test cases. Testing is so important to understand how well the application is performing, where we can locate any particular leaks, and also to know how we can improve these bugs, problems, and irritations that we experience. Testing lets developers to understand better how their code performs, and in turn learn more skills as they continue down their chosen path.

Lodash

A modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance & extras. Lodash makes JavaScript easier by taking the hassle out of working with arrays, numbers, objects, strings, etc. Lodash’s modular methods are great for:

• Iterating arrays, objects, & strings
• Manipulating & testing values
• Creating composite functions

ESLint

ESLint is a static code analysis tool for identifying problematic patterns found in JavaScript code. Rules in ESLint are configurable, and customized rules can be defined and loaded. ESLint covers both code quality and coding style issues. Inshort the goal is to make code more consistent and avoiding bugs. In many ways, it is similar to JSLint and JSHint with a few exceptions:

• ESLint uses Espree for JavaScript parsing.
• ESLint uses an AST to evaluate patterns in code.
• ESLint is completely pluggable, every single rule is a plugin and you can add more at runtime.

Passport

Passport is a unique authentication module for Node.js devs. The main goal of Passport is to help with authentication requests, this Passport achieves through the use of third-party plugins that act as authentication methods, otherwise known as strategies. The Passport API is straightforward, you give Passport a request that you need to authenticate, the Passport in turn gives you the hooks that let you control what happens after an authentication call fails, or succeeds. Exploring the Strategies, there are hundreds of authentication methods to choose from, starting from internal ones, all the way up to external ones like Google, Facebook, and others.

Moment

One of the most stable & maintained time manipulation libraries you can find. In the whole collection of libraries, created to solve the issues of formatting, parsing, converting and, generally, working with different forms of time, Moment.js is the one that has seen the widest adoption.

import moment from "moment";
// in relation to release date of this post
moment().format("MMMM Do YYYY"); // June 6th 2019
moment("20111031", "YYYYMMDD").fromNow(); // 8 years ago
moment().subtract(10, "days").calendar(); // 05/27/2019

With its latest v2 release, Moment.js got rewritten, to support latest ES6 syntax. This brings improved modularity and better performance for always-green browsers. Such things are important, especially when dealing with a library as big as Moment.js.

Chalk

With Chalk, we’re entering the world of terminal-related tools and libraries, where a number of downloads, and thus popularity, go crazy! Chalk is an extremely simple library, created for one, simple purpose – styling your terminal strings! Just like with Require – it proves that the most useful things are also the simplest ones.

import chalk from "chalk";
// string concatenation - template literals
console.log(`${chalk.blue("Hello")} World${chalk.red("!")}`);
 
// chainable API
console.log(chalk.blue.bgRed.bold("Hello world!"));

Of course, the API is simple, intuitive (chainable) and it works really well with all features that JS has to offer natively. The official page of the packages states that it’s used by more than 20K different packages! Maybe that’s where the weekly downloads count comes from (~25M). Even though, such numbers cannot be ignored.

Socket.io

Socket.io is just happened to get early access to the Nodejs package that allows you to build a truly real-time communication application that would require real-time streams of data content, either directly from the data that you are working with, or through an Application programming interface(API) that comes from another source. Some example apps like Twitter, they deployed a bot for collecting the latest tweets and on Facebook, bot for watching the news, thus with the combinations of APIs to explore some interesting things that work with data in real-time.

Request-Promise

Request is designed to be the simplest way possible to make http calls. It supports HTTPS and follows redirects by default. You can also stream a file to a PUT or POST request. Although it’s deprecated still the most useful package for network calls. few usages are listed below,

• Crawl a webpage
• GET/POST something from a JSON REST API
• POST like HTML forms do (also with Include a cookie)
• Get the full response instead of just the body

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