Applications built on the Node.js platform, an event-driven I/O server-side JavaScript environment based on Google Chrome’s V8 engine, are known as Node.js applications. Since both the server-side and the client-side are written in JavaScript, Node.js facilitates easier and faster implementation of codes, and processes requests quickly and simultaneously; this is greatly beneficial for building real-time applications, especially chat and streaming applications.

A classic problem that every backend developer has faced during their work is testing an application that uses a database. A perfectly valid solution is to use the real database for testing your application, but you would be doing an integration test, while you want a unit test. There are many ways to solve this problem. You could create the database with docker, or use an in-memory compatible one, but if you are writing unit tests that can be easily parallelized this will become quite uncomfortable.

Diagnosing and finding the root cause of issues is a crucial skill in software development. Software engineers spend the majority of their time reading and understanding existing code. Because of this, knowing how to debug your applications with proficiency will save you time and make you more effective.

We're delighted to announce our CloudWatch Integration for Elastic Load Balancer and AppDynamics Serverless APM, which now supports the instrumentation of AWS Lambda applications and microservices in both Node.js and Java.

When you need to troubleshoot an issue in your Node.js application, logs provide information about the severity of the problem, as well as insights into its root cause. You can use logs to capture stack traces and other types of activity, and trace them back to specific session IDs, user IDs, request endpoints—anything that will help you efficiently monitor your application.

The recent public release of Cycle’s API has already seen all sorts of innovative uses, from automating the deployments of medical applications, to creating customized monitoring services to track specific performance metrics. Everything you can do in the portal can also be accomplished via the API — it’s actually the exact same API we used to build the portal!

AWS Lambda is a service that confuses many people. For that reason, you may be wondering just how it works, and how you’d use it to build a highly scalable event-driven application. As someone who’s presumably no stranger to the internet, you must have seen the terms serverless, function-as-a-service, or AWS Lambda thrown across your screen a few times. Perhaps you’re looking to learn more. If so, you’re in luck.

Sometimes developers are hesitant to include logging due to performance concerns, but is this justified? And how much does library choice affect performance? The team at SolarWinds® Loggly® and myself decided to find out. We ran a series of performance tests on some of the most popular Node.js libraries. These tests are designed to show how quickly each library processed logging and the impact on the overall application. Let’s see how they did!

Winston is one of the most popular and versatile logging libraries for Node.js. With Winston, you can differentiate and redirect your logs to different places depending on their severity or purpose, and ensure there are redundant records in case of any failures or corruption later on. With the Winston 3.0 update, one of the biggest changes is the ability to apply custom formatting to your logs.