Node, Express, and APIs

The other day we installed and ran heroku. Today, it was learning about Node.js. At least on the surface, by reading over this document, it does a better 101 level breakdown of what node.js is doing (compared to heroku’s intro documentation/article). I do get confused trying to differentiate between the two, or are both needed in order to create a… backend JavaScript program, and heroku then serves it up to the web? Or are they different pieces of technology that accomplish the same thing? It’s a question hanging over my head.

Node.js runs JavaScript- if the .js didn’t give it away - and also doesn’t seem to need to be a service that serves up websites/apps online, but can be used as a local service to automate and accomplish local, on-computer tasks. The biggest gap in my understanding, after reading this all is: how? It seems one just needs to open a node, set up a port and voila it works. But how it works, what those ports and requests mean, and what they’re… transporting (?) is not explained in the least. Not for heroku, not for node.js. Just simply, it works, tada! I do hope that labs will dig a bit deeper into the context of what is going on between all the code (and one layer below) so that I’m not just blindly “typing in what works” but that I do understand what I’m typing in and making run.