I've yet to use Node.JS for anything yet even though I want too, it looks like Node.JS is only being used for analytics and chat applications is that all it is capable of or are people not fully using the power of Node? Balloons.io is a beautifully designed chat app, better than that of any other Node chat demo I've seen, nice one.
>it looks like Node.JS is only being used for analytics and chat applications is that all it is capable of or are people not fully using the power of Node?
Node is still immature, so it makes sense to use it in spite of the relative roughness only when it has a distinct advantage over other available technologies. Its ecosystem has also streamlined the building of server-push apps.
You can use node/express in lieu of rails or django, but it doesn't offer anything particularly interesting here. Analytics and chat apps tend to be built on persistent servers that have long-running stateful sessions, which the node ecosystem has focused on making easy... you could use EM or Twisted or Netty, but they aren't as shiny / low barrier to entry.
So, we are seeing people take advantage of the comparable strengths of a new technology that makes certain apps easier to build.
And you know... streams, which allow you to easily makes bridges between software and HTTP requests; so you can make video encoding in real time (while is being uploaded) just using node + ffmpeg; or you could process a text file content at the same time is being uploaded (perhaps a database backup?) or you could quickly set up a proxy that doesn't have to store the files.
