Node.js is a runtime environment enabling server-side execution of JavaScript. Here are some challenges you might face during its maintenance:
Extensive stack: Node.js doesn’t provide any specific convention for developing a web or mobile app. Frameworks that use Node.js are mostly unopinionated, meaning that they don’t give you any specific guidelines for the way code should be written. That’s why every web and mobile application requires an individual approach and, as a result, more experienced programmers who have worked out robust processes for developing and maintaining code internally.
Technical debt: Many problems with Node.js stem from a lack of good practices. The open-source community is very active and offers plenty of ways to build superb web and mobile applications. Having too many options, however, could be a problem for inexperienced developers and could lead to app structure incongruency. The ecosystem is still relatively immature. Implementing well-tested design patterns borrowed from other more traditional environments, like Java, is crucial for later code maintenance.
Scalability challenges: Node.js is a single-threaded process, which makes scaling a little bit more complicated. Developing more complex applications with CPU/MEM-heavy computations might require dividing them into smaller microservices that handle different operations. When architecting a performant and scalable Node.js web application, keep in mind it should be relatively small and stateless. Recent years have brought development in the area in the form of different architectural approaches such as the aforementioned microservices or serverless, as well as Node.js threading support (still in the experimental stage, but they should be a regular feature in Node v12).
Poor documentation: Documentation is crucial to every IT development project – it gives you an idea of how the app works. It tells developers what the main components are, how they relate to each other, and what the main purpose of the application is. It provides explanations as to why certain solutions, especially the less obvious ones, were applied. Poor documentation will very likely extend development time and make the whole process more difficult. It can expose the app to problems with performance and inhibit the implementation of new features.