Today, the number of technologies used in the web may confuse anybody who doesn’t have enough web app development expertise. Every project has a unique set of specifications and requirements. When it’s time to build an application, developers have to choose the right combination of technologies to ensure the best possible result. The back-end is the part of a web application that is “hidden” from the user’s eyes. Nonetheless, everything that happens on the server-side powers the user-facing side of the web application, ensuring its trouble-free functionality.
Today, we’ll take a look at Node.js and Python, two of the most popular backend related technologies at the moment. We’ll learn about their strong and weak sides, which will help you make a more educated decision when choosing a particular technology for your project.
First of all, it’s important to understand that programming languages and frameworks are initially designed to perform a set of specific tasks. That’s why the strategy of choosing the most popular technologies or those that were used in successful projects, in most scenarios, won’t be the wiser one. When you decide, you should consider the following aspects of your future web application:
- Type of application. It may be a business app, a mobile game, or a CRM solution. For each of these cases, software development companies use a specific set of tools;
- Application geography. Different development tools are utilized for apps built to be used within an organization and those that supposed to provide users with access from all around the world;
- Budget, as you can suggest, also plays its role. In some cases, app development requires the involvement of a broader range of specialists, which, in turn, will increase your costs on their salaries.
As you understand, the list includes only a couple of examples of how different app requirements can affect the stack of technologies used during development. What you have to remember is that it’s essential to consider every feature of your future app when you decide to cooperate with a company that provides web app development services. Now, we’d like to shed some light on technologies that may become the building blocks of your future web application.
Python. Great Extensibility and the Ease of Use at the Expense of Performance and Scalability
Python is not something new. This programming language appeared in the early ’90s and remains one of the most popular, innovative, and flexible technologies at the moment. Constantly developing Python libraries, comprehensive documentation, and extensive community explain high interest among developers worldwide. Besides, Python is excellent for such a wide range of tasks as scientific computing, data science, machine learning, and AI.
Just like JavaScript, on which the Node is based, Python is an interpreted language. It does not give reason to expect that it’ll demonstrate some incredible results in terms of speed of work, compared to compiled languages, such as Java, for example. But if we put Node and Python opposite each other, we’ll see that in most cases Node will operate faster. The reason is that, unlike Node, Python is a single flow. That’s why it works slowly, and you, most probably, shouldn’t choose Python if your number one priority is high performance of the application.
Let’s talk about scaling possibilities. Python uses Global Interpreter Lock, which doesn’t support multithreading required to scale a web app. Developers can use various libraries that can enable multithreading functionality, but this Python feature is not enough to consider Python-based apps “naturally” multithreading. The inner architecture of this technology doesn’t allow running multiple tasks simultaneously, which can negatively affect performance. Besides, Python is dynamically-typed, which doesn’t allow the efficient maintenance of growing development teams.
What’s good about Python is that there’s no shortage of extensibility options. Since its first appearance in the ’90s and during the further years, tons of development tools have been created. For example, with zero effort, Python developers can use the full power of Django, Flask, web2py, and more of full-stack tools.
Let’s be honest. Developers do not always write every line of code themselves during project development. Sometimes it’s better to rely on someone else’s experience instead of reinventing the wheel. That’s when the community becomes important. Python is older than Node and is also an open-source technology. The user community includes an immense number of contributors with different expertise. Both business owners and Python developers can benefit from access to such sources of knowledge.
Node.JS. Excellent Performance If CPU-intensive Tasks in Not One of Your Priorities
Node is an environment that allows using JavaScript for both back-end and front-end development. Compared to Python, this technology is very young. It was launched in 2009 and has gained enormous popularity among web developers.
The first thing to mention is that, unlike Python, Node can provide remarkable performance since it is interpreted with the V8 engine in which Google invests heavily. Node executes code outside the web browser which allows building resource-efficient apps with excellent performance. Also, the event-driven non-blocking architecture of Node allows processing several requests at the same time, which also gives a boost to the overall performance.
Developers don’t have to create a large monolithic core and can build a set of microservices and modules instead. Each of them can communicate with a lightweight mechanism running its own process. The ease of adding extra microservices and modules make the app development process more flexible. All these features allow scaling apps effortlessly, especially compared to Python-based projects.
Developers can easily customize Node by integrating it with various tools. And there’s plenty to choose from. For example, there’s Babel, a JavaScript compiler that facilitates front-end development with old versions of Node or the web browser. Jasmine is a tool for unit testing, and Logo.io can help with project monitoring and troubleshooting. Migrat, PM2, and Webpack can help developers deal with data migration, process management, and module building. Besides these web development tools, there are dozens of others that make Node a pretty decent choice for web application development.
Node is a relatively young technology, especially compared to Python. Nevertheless, it has a large and active contributing community. Web developers from all over the world have grown to love this technology and are always happy to share their knowledge. For business owners, it means that there’s always the possibility to find specialists with enough expertise for Node app development and further maintenance. Developers can also benefit from the large community since they can always rely on peer support.
Choosing Node.js development will be a good decision for apps that process numerous concurrent requests, utilize heavy client-side rendering features, or constantly exchange data between client and server. IoT solutions, real-time apps, complex single-page apps (SPA), real-time collaboration services, can be built with ease using this technology. Unfortunately, Node has its disadvantages. For example, it won’t be the best choice for an app that relies on heavy computation. If you want to develop a data science app, it’s better to choose another option. Also, the rapid growth of JavaScript libraries brings some documentation problems that developers will have to put up with.
Conclusions
When it comes to comparing different web development technologies, there’s no better conclusion that “there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.” Intentionally, developers create tools that will help them solve a specific range of tasks. In the “Python vs. Node” battle, none of the technologies beats the other. Each web app has its own requirements, and developers should choose a particular set of tools based on these needs. Python is used more in the entire web, and such popularity is fully deserved. Node, on the other hand, has such advantages as high scalability and better performance.
If you want to learn more about different backend technologies and how they can affect your web app, contact us to receive a consultation from our specialists.