Hi Rick,

>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 also have some doubts if those benchmaks they cite translate into usable backend platforms.
But there are some numbers and at least potential benefits in RAM I think I believe...

> 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 :-)

Yupp, that on top of JS with namespace ursurping and a slightly different way of working in chained event memory space...

>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.

You have to pay for that saved RAM somehow - and that is by synching in the same memory space.
Makes my above finding more interesting ;-)).

>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.

That and Validation objects/functions reusable on both sides.
And no, I don't feel very safe thinking of monkeypatched validation...
Maybe showing my age..

>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.

agreed - but when I see Rails having a huge following I start to wonder,
as Ruby is a language I have even more trouble grokking.
Growing such a following mostly because of Activerecord and convention over config ?

>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 :-))

The scalability IMHO is somewhat of a red herring, proving JS on V8 can work fast enough.
For me the benefit is in one language (even with some differences) used on client and server.

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

No - but Python [or vfp] are not supported in the browser.
Even C# [via SL] seems to get less love today from both MS and the dev side,
and Java had moved mostly to the backend before the rise of Pads, although Swing is supported on all PC OS browsers

As at least partial client side intelligence is needed even in browser apps, it could be the lesser of evils.
Automatic translation to JS is also brittle at least (Pyjamas for example), so why not bite the bullet
either via sane in house standards or a saner variant like coffescript is aiming for ?

My personal hopes were dashed a lot when WebSQL was dismantled from HTML5 öast year
by Oracle and MS working in concert. But that is another story altogether ;-)

>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.

I'm not advocating building something on Node yet -
for me reading about other languages, sometimes playing with them makes me a better programmer
by widening the mental horizons. And now Node on Win makes large steps forward -
earliy on just getting a working system with node was something of an adventure.

I am still more of a backend kind of guy - from both work thrown at me and personal lookout,
even if I was sometimes working on roboting IE back in IE3 and IE4 times.

Always a pleasure reading your stuff (including source)

thomas