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Ask HN: Whats the future of node?

7 points by bugBunny ↗ HN
hi, planning our big project for commercial purpose.. Whole team (yes we're all pretty same, since we worked together b4 too :); has background in .NET, php and some java + low-level embedded development in C... During our research we figured out that Node is really popular, and we did give it a try with some test BLOG application, showing some great things while learning... output of our project is SaaS with a lots of database querying with some mathematics within backend code. Wondering is it good idea to start with Node, and is it not 'just another language' outthere?

cheers

6 comments

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kls
The benefit of node is not in the language selection, though JavaScript does have it's advantages as well as drawbacks. The real elegance of Node is that it provides a low level server toolbox that you can rapidly build high level frameworks and applications on top off. I was never really taken by the hype but we decided to use it on a project and I was really surprised how quick it was to set up a REST layer for our app using Node. That's really it's greatest benefit you can bolt together some pretty impressive network based applications pretty quickly.
hasenj
Wait, what?

How's this different from any other platform? The same thing can be said about rails, django, php, or any other platform.

MatthewPhillips
No it can't. Those things aren't a "low level server toolbox". You couldn't, for example, build an application using WebSockets into Rails until it was built into Rails. Because Rails isn't low level.
JuDue
Yeah but ruby does.

Do you program your WebSockets in railwayjs?

lumberjack
What are you worried about? If it's support or API, don't be. There is a ton of support for Node.js already. As far as web technologies go, I dare say Node.js has approached stability by now. Personally I love the asynchronous flow which is comparatively simple to implement and it only took me a day to go from zero to building a webapp in Node.js. However, you'll be working in JS. For small things it's bearable. For larger projects it's a pain, at least for me.

As a related question, has anyone tried using Node.js as the final glue code, taking advantage of easy asynchronous function implementation while writing the core logic in some other language? I know you can technically do that but I don't know what overhead I should expect if I attempted it?!

bugBunny
well... thanks, we will for sure go with it all through. Hope we don't need to return back at one stage !

thanks