In the ever-evolving landscape of web development, choosing the right framework is paramount to ensuring efficiency, scalability, and maintainability of your applications. While Node.js, with its lightweight and flexible nature, has been a popular choice for building server-side applications, developers often seek a more structured approach to handle complex projects. This is where NestJS emerges as a game-changer, offering a robust framework built on top of Node.js and Express.js. Let's know the advantages that NestJS brings to the table, making it the preferred choice for modern web development.
Object-Oriented Programming Architecture
I have always been fascinated by OOP from day one and I love working on OOP frameworks. NestJS embraces the principles of object-oriented programming, providing developers with a familiar and structured approach to building applications. By organizing code into modules, controllers, services, and decorators, NestJS promotes code reusability, maintainability, and separation of concerns. This architectural pattern facilitates better code organization and makes it easier to scale and extend applications as they grow in complexity.
TypeScript Support
One of the standout features of NestJS is its native support for TypeScript, a statically typed superset of JavaScript. I have always loved the beauty of JavaScript and TypeScript simply makes it even more beautiful. TypeScript brings static typing, interfaces, and advanced IDE features to Node.js development, empowering developers to catch errors early in the development process and write more predictable and maintainable code. With NestJS, developers can leverage the full power of TypeScript to build robust, type-safe APIs and applications, ensuring a smoother development experience and reducing the likelihood of runtime errors.
CLI Tool
NestJS comes equipped with a powerful Command Line Interface (CLI) tool that streamlines the process of creating, building, and managing NestJS projects. The CLI provides scaffolding for generating modules, controllers, services, and other boilerplate code, enabling developers to jumpstart their projects with minimal setup. Additionally, the CLI offers built-in support for generating RESTful and GraphQL endpoints, database integration, and testing, further enhancing developer productivity and speeding up the development cycle.
Developer Experience
With its intuitive and well-documented APIs, extensive tooling, and vibrant community support, NestJS offers a superior developer experience compared to traditional Node.js frameworks. The framework's modular architecture and dependency injection system make it easy to write testable and maintainable code, while its built-in support for middleware, validation, and exception handling simplifies common development tasks. Furthermore, NestJS provides out-of-the-box integration with popular libraries and tools like TypeORM, GraphQL, Passport.js, and Swagger, empowering developers to build feature-rich and scalable applications with ease.
Besides these, there are many more advantages that NestJS brings to the table like out-of-box setup for unit testing your APIs, exception handing, awesome support for MongoDB and by mongoose in the form of @nestjs/mongoose package, support for ORMs like TypeORM, prisma and many more. The official NestJS docs are lucid and well-maintained and there is a big community which uses this framework out there. So, to sum up, I really loved using NestJS and I feel like beginners who don't have good understanding of backend architecture should really opt for NestJS and offload architecture burden to NestJS.
