JavaScript language is primarily used inside your web browser. Your computer downloads a JavaScript file and executes it on your machine. But if you want to build a dynamic website, you need a server-side language. Like PHP, Java, Python, etc. Programs written in these languages handle incoming requests and produce dynamic HTML. HTML that varies, depending on the request, who is asking and what data is available in the underlying database. But for more than a decade we can also use JavaScript on the server. The same language can be used for a very different purpose. Namely, listening and handling web requests. But also implementing command-line utilities and one-off scripts. This became possible after extracting the JavaScript engine from
45: Node.js: running JavaScript on the server (!)
JavaScript language is primarily used inside your web browser. Your computer downloads a JavaScript file and executes it on your machine. But if you want to build a dynamic website, you need a server-side language. Like PHP, Java, Python, etc. Programs written in these languages handle incoming requests and produce dynamic HTML. HTML that varies, depending on the request, who is asking and what data is available in the underlying database. But for more than a decade we can also use JavaScript on the server. The same language can be used for a very different purpose. Namely, listening and handling web requests. But also implementing command-line utilities and one-off scripts. This became possible after extracting the JavaScript engine from
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