

Ask HN: nodejs, express and jade - worth it? - Skywing

Hi all,<p>A few weekends ago I wrote a simple web traffic analyzer. Very simple website. I told a few people about it, and also told them about the sites that I was basically mimicking (for my own personal education). I didn't make any updates to the site after that single weekend of working on it. Well, I found out today that 2 of those people actually enjoy using it. One of them made a few feature requests today.<p>Now, this site is very minimal. It's not pleasing at all to look at. It doesn't even use any custom CSS - only Yahoo's base CSS file. So, I'm thinking about making it better. As I mentioned, I wrote this site several weekends ago and since then I've been playing around with nodejs, expressjs (web framework) and am about to try out the jade template engine. Jade itself is entirely new to me, and at first glance I laughed at the thought of using it. It has been sitting in the back of my mind though since I laughed at it, making me wonder if I could force myself to perhaps try it to see what it's all about.<p>Anyways, I'm thinking about re-writing this site using nodejs, express and jade. It perhaps won't be better, because I'm a nodejs beginner, but it may be a good learning experience.<p>Does anyone out there actually use nodejs to power their entire website? Is it even recommended for that? It seems very low level and I am not sure how productive I'll ever be with it. This Jade template engine is pretty much a foreign language to me. I've mostly always used engines similar to Jinja2, where it's still entirely HTML.<p>I just wanted to see some thoughts on nodejs as the choice backend engine for a complete website!
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kersny
Although I have never built a "complete website" on the node.js stack, the
time that I have spent developing on the platform has been very enjoyable and
I've put a decent amount of effort in. There are many articles as well as
github repositories that can teach you what you need to know to get up and
running. I recommend <https://github.com/ry/node/wiki> and
<http://expressjs.com/> for reading on the subject. Good Luck!

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amitc
There are many product websites including companies using just express.js, see
<http://expressjs.com/applications.html>

node.js is bound to have even more.

About it being worth it, it is worth trying. At the end, you would know about
Event servers, mini frameworks & more.

It is a newer area, so expect some hiccups.

A tip: There are some express.js screencast links in the github readme,
<https://github.com/visionmedia/express#readme>

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Ataraxy
I'm not a pro or anything but this is probably of interest to you:

<http://howtonode.org/> is built with node and
<https://github.com/creationix/wheat> is the blogging engine it was built on

Hope it helps.

