How to interact with Node JS from client side

I am building a web portal to interact with internal databases and potentially run ssh commands. I chose NodeJS with Express for this purpose.

Light weight server-side interactions such as templating or routing I managed with Node and Express but I am looking for ways to do heavy tasks such as DB work (insert/update/delete) or run node code with the click of a button from client-side.

My research brought a couple of ideas however I want to use the one which is future-proof, secure (but not vulnerable to security configurations) and scaleable. Please share your thoughts and guidance on the matter?

• Socket IO (may not be scaleable)
• REST API
• AJAX (Has issues with AJAX and CORS in the past)
• Other approaches????

Thanks

via Ben77