Five most useful Node.js packages
Considering the popularity of Node.js as a runtime environment that can execute JavaScript code and use it for building back-end services and API, the majority of frontend developers with the knowledge of this language managed to become full-stack developers. Node.js provides the opportunity to create solutions to any problem by applying the needed modules. These modules and frameworks can be installed from Node Package Manager (NPM). This article will review the five most useful Node.js packages that could help different development projects.
Express
Among the most popular Node.js packages, one could find Express.js almost in every list of the most useful NPMs. Express is a backend framework for building applications. The primary merit of the express is its minimal and flexible nature, which allows creating both simple or complex pages. Also, the developers praise its performance and significantly high test coverage. Since Express.js also has robust routing and HTTP helpers, there are a lot of sites that use this framework with Node.js.
Date-fns
This toolset is aimed to easily make manipulations with dates using JavaScript in Node.js. Namely, date-fns provides a very extensive library of the most popular helpers (conversion, intervals, timestamp, and other date-related actions) for the implementation of dates into an application. In addition, this package is reliable, simple, and fast. Since you would need to have at least some integration of date functionality into the development, this package is a must.
Jest
This package provides the testing solution which uses JavaScript and can be used for any type of React project. One of the main advantages of Jest is the notion that it works out of the box and does not require additional configuration. The fast and reliable performance of the package is due to the fact that the processes are parallelized. Also, Jests shows the reasons why a test has failed. That is why it is one of the most popular NPMs for testing.
Molecular
This library for Node.js contains microservices that can be used to build apps. The primary purpose of molecular is to build scalable services and provide reliable performance. With the variety of built-in modules, you can find the solution to any development task. Considering that the microservice architecture is a perfect solution to scale an application, using a molecular framework can provide the needed modules to power any application.
Socket.io
It is one of the most popular real-time engines which can provide event-based communication between server and clients. This package is usually used to create highly reliable and low-latency chat applications. After setting up a basic server, you can create functions with io that will be sending the information from the clients to the server and from the server to the clients. The users of this library admit that Socket.io is very easy to use and can be a really helpful package for Node.js.
Conclusions
Of course, there are not a lot of other packages that can be utilized in the development. Considering the possibilities of Node.js to use JavaScript to develop applications, finding the right modules and packages is the key. In this regard, you can always find the needed package on the official website of NPM.
