All language subtitles for 7. Node.js VS JavaScript

Welcome back.

So how is no different than JavaScript?

Well, we know that JavaScript is a programming language, and any time you want to run some JavaScript

code or a file on your computer, you send it to a JavaScript engine like Chrome's V8.

But also potentially others like Firefox is Spider Monkey Engine or Chakra, which was used in early

versions of Microsoft's Edge browser.

This engine then converts those JavaScript instructions to those that your hardware on your computer

or phone understands.

And it then goes ahead and follows those instructions in many ways as a developer, you're the boss

and it's the computer doing all the hard work.

I know, I know that programming can be hard work sometimes too.

But as programmers, we get to do the fun work, giving the computer all of the higher level JavaScript

instructions while it goes ahead and deals with all of the bits and bytes.

Now this flow applies regardless of how you're running your JavaScript, whether it's Najib's or Chrome

or any of the other browsers.

There's always a JavaScript engine reading in your code.

In fact, all of these browsers that you see here use Chrome's V8 engine anyway.

No, this is a way of running JavaScript instructions on your computer.

Outside of the web browser node only became possible because the Chrome team from Google made the V8

engine open source.

And Ryan Dole took advantage of this release by the Chrome team and created the node runtime around

the V8 JavaScript engine.

Now, note contains a lot more than just V8, but prior to Node JavaScript could only be run in a browser

and not standalone because browsers were the only ones who had JavaScript engines like V8 Node was built

so that we could run JavaScript anywhere, including your computer, but also your phone.

Or believe it or not, even to control robots whenever you run JavaScript outside of the browser.

Chances are you're running node now.

There are other JS runtimes available now like Deno, which uses the V8 engine similarly to nodes,

and there's even ways of running Node.js using other JavaScript engines.

So there's a way of plugging in the Chakra engine from Microsoft to power nodes, but these are all

modern developments.

Node with the eight was where it all really started, and we're using JavaScript on the backend, which

is something we'll get into very shortly.

It's we're using JavaScript on the backend became widespread.

All right.

So enough with the history review.

What's the difference to us as developers when running JavaScript code and node compared to when we

run it in the browser going into our trusty rappel?

We've already seen that in node window and all of the global functions that it provides in the browser

are not defined.

This makes sense because there's no browser or browser window that's currently running.

Instead, Node has its own version called Global, which like Window, has a bunch of things that we

can use.

For example, the process object which we saw earlier and the ARG V property that has the list of arguments

that were passed into our node program.

We can access things like global dot process dot RV, but we don't need to import them from elsewhere.

In fact, we don't even need to specify that they come from global.

We can just type process dot RV, and it's already in scope.

Global has all of the functionality that we can use directly, even the console log function that we're

so familiar with is actually global, that console, that log and we can say hello.

We don't have access to browser specific things like window or the document object, but we do have

access to some very useful node specific things.

Let's learn more about the globals that node gives us in the next video.

I'll see you then.