Important Node.js modules used by Node JS development company – Part 1

Since the release of Node.js, the technology has become more and more popular. It is commonly used
by the development companies to build server-side web applications, or in general at the time of
development process.

The Node Package Manager, NPM, contains a huge collection of Node.js modules, more than a quarter
of a million. We present some popular modules, commonly used by a Node JS development company,
to build web applications.

To manipulate images

ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick are a couple of popular tools used to create, edit, compose and
convert images. Owing to the Node.js module gm, both these tools can be used directly from within
the JavaScript code. Whether it is resizing an image, clipping or encoding it – the module supports all
of these image operations and lot more.  

To process images

Sharp, based on super quick libvips image processing library, performs almost five times faster than
ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick, to compress and resize images. It supports various image formats,
including JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, SVG and WebP and provides output in either JPG, PNG, WebP or
uncompressed raw pixel streams.

To format date

The standard JavaScript API has the date object to work with date and time, but this object is not user-
friendly when it comes to formatting and printing dates. On the contrary, Moment.js comes with a
clean and fluid API, making the code readable and easy to understand. In addition, it offers an add-on
that is leveraged by a Node JS development company to parse and format dates in different time zones.

To validate strings

The forms used on a website or on any web page should validate the values that a user inputs – both on
client-side and server-side, to prevent malicious data. This is when validator.js module comes into play.
It provides various methods to validate strings, such as isEmail(), isURL(), isCreditCard() and is
MobilePhone().

To work with color values

Changing the format of color values is a common task for the developers. TinyColor2 helps the
developers in such a scenario. It provides conversion methods, such as toHexString(), toRGBString(),
and methods for all types of color operations like lighten(), saturate() and complement().

To generate PDF files

When it comes to dynamic generation of PDF files, PDFKit module is the right option. It supports
embedding images, embedding font types and vector graphics definition, either by specifying SVG
paths or programmatically. In addition, the module allows the programmers of a Node JS development company to define links, highlight text, include notes and do lot more.

To process HTML files

ThenCheerio helps in the processing of HTML code on the server side. Although it executes only
the subset of the core jQuery library, it simplifies server-side processing of HTML code. The module is
built on htmlparser2 module, which is an HTML, XML and RSS parser.

To process CSV (comma-separated values) files

More often than not, the CSV format is used to interchange table-based data. Node-cvg makes it easy
to work with CSV data in JavaScript, and offers functionalities to generate, parse, transform and
stringify CSV. It provides different options, like callback API, synchronous API and stream API,
allowing the developers to choose their preferred option.

To process markdown files

Markdown is a popular format to create web content. Marked is a module that can be used to process
markdown content programmatically. Its input is a string of markdown code and the output is
appropriate HTML code. The developers can further use custom renderers to customize the HTML
output.

These are some of the modules that help the developers to build a web app using Node.js. If you are
also considering to build your server-side Node.js web app, partner with a trusted and experienced
Node JS development company that can understand your business requirements and make the best
use of the technology to build a high-performance app for you.