

Ask HN: Whats the future of node? - bugBunny

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?<p>cheers
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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?

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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?!

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

thanks

