Interesting... i've been looking over a bunch of node.js stuff lately.

I've been struggling to make sense of node/js and it's best use case. I don't buy for a minute that it's going to be a great platform to build back end code at least in the near future. Asynchronous flow for server side request management is a bitch especially when it comes to event chaining. If you have to run multiple operations and chain them together you end up in spaghetti hell :-) If you don't need that - well then the async functinoality that node.js crows about doesn't do you any good. If it does (ie. your bound by your slowest async task) then you have to deal with synchronization to produce a single coherent output source.

There's that and the fact that server side node.js code doesn't use a DOM and doesn't use a common template engine that can be potentially shared. So you're still writing server and client code separately. I see it maybe, maybe useful for providing AJAX service data in JSON using some NoSql backend but even that gets tricky with complex operations that require more than one backend call to coordinate.

I suspect there will be improvements and better thought out use cases in the future, but right now node.js is just another developer experiment in the making that's kicking up more hype than its proven worth at the moment.

I find it entertaining that so many folks are looking for 'more efficient' solutions on the server when they are running apps that get a few thousand hits a day. Scalability is rarely an issue for 90% of applications out there and even for the remainder hardware rather than software is the deciding factor (*nix systems just scale out better than Windows does :-))


+++ Rick ---


Do you really want to write business logic or even templates in JavaScript on the server?

Especially at the moment - with node.js being so new and minimal connectivity. Lots of people have ideas on how node.js would be useful but for application level work? Unless there's a much richer framework for widgets available to make data access easy (and object oriented at that) all of this is a moot point.


>MS is realizing Node is one of the things to look out for - Scott H. blogs about it and Webmatrix.
>
>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WebMatrixAndNodejsTheEasiestWayToGetStartedWithNodeOnWindows.aspx
>
>Yes, JS is not as clean as Python (and we know that sometimes the ability to get down and dirty is not always negative),
>but a JS client / JS backend can miss out some of the pyjamas brittlenes visible on the pyjamas list,
>or other translations from various laguages moving data via JSON and partially duplicating validating code.
>
>I don't understand/have a frame of reference for even half of the points argued on the node list,
>but still think it is wise to at least scan. Currently I see either a Node/Js based or a Python fwk as my future.