Mid Sweden University

The objective of this project is to build a high-performance web server based on Node.js, a modern web server released in 2009. Node.js relies on an event-driven main loop with an asynchronous input and output model, which introduces a new way of writing software for the Internet. The thesis outlines the software stack and workflow used to build applications that are running on top of Node.js. These applications are written in JavaScript. The implementation part covers a chat application with a server and client component. It does not use Apache as a web server or PHP as a scripting language. Data is sent asynchronously via HTML5 web sockets. One of the central questions is whether there is the possibility for Node.js to take the place of Apache as a new, contemporary web server. Factors discussed include its distribution, documentation and support, speed and available modules (plugins). In order to show one of Node.js advantages, namely its speed, a benchmark is being conducted. Therefore, its base performance is being measured and compared to the performance of the Apache HTTP server.