After a year of using Node.js in production
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After a year of using Node.js in production
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Re: After a year of using Node.js in production
#2I have used Node.js in production for about 5 years now and I must agree with the sentiment that JavaScript is "Easy to learn, impossible to master". Yes, error handling is a little confusing at first but it stems from JavaScript's asynchronous nature which is naturally complex for the linear mind.
My personal sentiment is to just use Promises, like everywhere. ES7 async/await will really help with this too.
Re: After a year of using Node.js in production
#3> Coming from other languages such as Python, Ruby or PHP you’d expect throwing and catching errors, or even returning an error from a function would be a straightforward way of handling errors. Not so with Node. Instead, you get to pass your errors around in your callbacks (or promises) - thats right, no throwing of exceptions.
Promises let you throw errors normally. They will propagate up the call stack in a similar manner. With bluebird, you will also get full stack traces in development mode and the performance penalty for that isn't too bad.
> The last thing that I found frustrating was the lack of standards. Everyone seems to have their own idea of how the above points should be handled. Callbacks? Promises? Error handling? Build scripts?
Promises are in ES6 (i don't think it gets more standard than that) and have well defined semantics, including error handling, shared between libraries: https://promisesaplus.com/
I know that Bluebird's promisifyAll might seem like a bit of a hack, but just try it out. It works surprisingly well, and its really painstaikingly tuned for near-zero performance loss. It will probably be both less painful to do and more performant than any manual attempt to wrap a callback based API into a promise one.
Re: After a year of using Node.js in production
#4I train enterprise node.js for a living.
My recommendation is to just use songbird (which exposes the forthcoming promise API from core, built on bluebird), async/await and the async `trycatch` library so you don't have to worry about a 3rd party package's choice of asynchrony. It also comes with optional long stack traces.
Re: After a year of using Node.js in production
#5I've spent a lot of time writing Javascript on the front-end in the last year using both React and React Native. I've found the React ecosystem to be a sane, productive and enjoyable development environment.
Interested in sharing more model logic between our front- and backends, I also investigated writing some new backend features using Node (we're currently developing with Rails). But after days of research and playing around with the available options, I came to a conclusion similar to Gavin's -- any reasonably complex backend requires you to either roll your own everything, or try to cobble together literally hundreds of tiny dependencies that weren't built to go together, and then somehow keep track of all of their regressions and breaking changes.
Node's fantastic performance and unique ability to share logic between client and server are enticing, but I just don't trust the community and "best practices" around it enough to bet the farm on it for now.
Re: After a year of using Node.js in production
#6doesnt node support modules? thats a way to avoid callback hell
Re: After a year of using Node.js in production
#7> Coming from other languages such as Python, Ruby or PHP you’d expect throwing and catching errors, or even returning an error from a function would be a straightforward way of handling errors. Not so with Node. Instead, you get to pass your errors around in your callbacks (or promises) - thats right, no throwing of exceptions. Promises let you throw errors normally. They will propagate up the call stack in a simila…
Kind of related: One thing that has bit me a few times with promises is accidentally missing a return in the promise body. As such whatever called the promise just sits there forever, waiting for something that will never come. Is there a way in Bluebird to have it throw an exception or similar if the function executes without returning anything?
Re: After a year of using Node.js in production
#8Thanks for this. The Node / Javascript ecosystem just seems like one I don't want to be a part of.
I feel so lucky to have avoided the whole disgusting web stack.
Re: After a year of using Node.js in production
#9These types of articles make me laugh. Typically a dev with many many years experience with one language, learned all it's quirks, standards, etc decides to try Node.js because it's the "new hot fun toy", and expect it to work like their old language, and realize that is not how it works, doesn't know where to find what and fails real hard to realize that JavaScript in general is in a huge influx of updating at this moment, which by nature propagates to Node.js.
The end result is they get frustrated and go back to their old language.
Re: After a year of using Node.js in production
#10> Coming from other languages such as Python, Ruby or PHP you’d expect throwing and catching errors, or even returning an error from a function would be a straightforward way of handling errors. Not so with Node. Instead, you get to pass your errors around in your callbacks (or promises) - thats right, no throwing of exceptions. Promises let you throw errors normally. They will propagate up the call stack in a simila…
Kind of related: One thing that has bit me a few times with promises is accidentally missing a return in the promise body. As such whatever called the promise just sits there forever, waiting for something that will never come. Is there a way in Bluebird to have it throw an exception or similar if the function executes without returning anything?
Normally bluebird should produce this warning when that happens:
http://bluebirdjs.com/docs/warning-explanations.html#warning...
If it doesn't do that for your case then its likely that it needs some fixing - you should probably open an issue and we'll try to reproduce it...
Also, thenlint might work for you: https://www.npmjs.com/package/thenlint