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After a year of using Node.js in production

geekforbrains.com

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Re: After a year of using Node.js in production

#41

Post by raarts »

snappy173 wrote: post #26
eldude wrote: post #4

I 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.

>async/await in my experience, async/await is a great way to layer indirection and obfuscation over what is still callback hell. it may look better in the editor, but it's hell to debug.

When I initially encountered event -based processing (libevent in C), those callbacks were indeed difficult to wrap my mind around. But I learned to structure the code in the editor, keeping everything together which made it manageable. I 've worked with node for a couple of months now, and I find promises to be more confusing, because it obfuscates the callback in my mind, and makes it look like ordinary function calls.

Re: After a year of using Node.js in production

#42

Post by clessg »

For web applications, I've been very happy with the up-and-coming Phoenix[0], a framework for the Elixir language.

Very well-designed and thought-out, fast, productive. Leans functional and immutable rather than object-oriented and mutable. It's kind of like Rails but without most of the problems.

[0] http://www.phoenixframework.org/

Re: After a year of using Node.js in production

#44

Post by Chris911 »

Most of the problems described in the articles can be solved by simply using promises. Error handling is centralized in your chain and any function can throw and just like Python or Ruby you can catch anywhere you want. As for consistency between callbacks, promises and generators, just pick one. We switched from callbacks to promises and it was a great move. Error handling greatly improved and the code looks a lot nicer. No more callbacks hell. Ever.

We switched our backend from Python to Node almost 2 years ago now and it was a great decision for us. If you handle a code base that deals with a lot of async requests Node is definitely a top contender.

Re: After a year of using Node.js in production

#45

Post by koolba »

pjungwir wrote: post #13
spion wrote: post #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 simila…

I gave a talk about handling errors in Node a few years ago: https://github.com/pjungwir/node-errors-talk At the time the solution was "use domains", but I think domains are deprecated now. It was painful enough that I have stuck with Rails since then. I'm glad to hear that Promises are an improvement!

Domains have been deprecated since at least 0.10. As of yet there's no replacement for them and all node apps should be using them. There's no other way to catch "But ... but ... that can't happen!" type errors.

Re: After a year of using Node.js in production

#46

Post by deedubaya »

clessg wrote: post #42

For web applications, I've been very happy with the up-and-coming Phoenix[0], a framework for the Elixir language. Very well-designed and thought-out, fast, productive. Leans functional and immutable rather than object-oriented and mutable. It's kind of like Rails but without most of the problems. [0] http://www.phoenixframework.org/

I've found Elixir to be a delightful language with very palatable syntax compared to ruby. It has been a really enjoyable transition, with some vague reminders of the parts I really like about JavaScript.

Re: After a year of using Node.js in production

#47

Post by woah »

firasd wrote: post #25

I've been on a similar learning curve with Node over the last year, and it has certainly been a rougher incline than other languages I've used. The whole async situation needs to settle down, it's completely unacceptable to write code with callbacks, promises, etc. This is because they are not just challenging to deal with, but intrinsically wrong in concept. I have to wait for a database query to complete, then pass…

Callbacks are ugly, but are probably the semantically simplest way to handle asynchronicity. Promises are ugly too, but are semantically the same thing as async/await. I agree that promises and callbacks are not pleasing to the eye, but they are completely logical ways to do things.

Re: After a year of using Node.js in production

#48

Post by Touche »

Wintamute wrote: post #32

> You use Grunt!? Everyone uses Gulp!? Wait no, use native NPM scripts! Although couched as a criticism this is actually the community fixing itself. The evolution from Grunt > Gulp > npm scripts is movement away from needless complexity towards simplicity. Npm scripts are effectively just Bash commands that build and manage your project, which sometimes employ small, unixy tools written in Node. This self correction…

NPM scripts are just a different problem. See:

https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/724259780676575232?l...

https://github.com/ReactiveX/rxjs/blob/a3ec89605a24a6f54e577...

Already people are coming up with new "solutions" to this problem that looks more like Grunt. It's a repetitive circle. Personally I just use Make.

Re: After a year of using Node.js in production

#49

Post by cyberpanther »

I think by reading the comments here and the article, its apparent that Node.js just isn't as mature yet. If you know what you're doing, it can be great, but for the noobs the right way to do things is not easily apparent. Couple this with the huge choice in libraries and frameworks, makes Node.js harder for now. I think the base is good though and given more time it will become more easy to wield. This is typical of any new tool. And yes Node.js has been around the block for a while, but it is still newish compared to Python, Ruby, PHP, etc. So you're going to pay a new adopter tax still.

Re: After a year of using Node.js in production

#50

Post by mikeryan »

zxv wrote: post #36
firasd wrote: post #25

I've been on a similar learning curve with Node over the last year, and it has certainly been a rougher incline than other languages I've used. The whole async situation needs to settle down, it's completely unacceptable to write code with callbacks, promises, etc. This is because they are not just challenging to deal with, but intrinsically wrong in concept. I have to wait for a database query to complete, then pass…

Yes, I too find callbacks an obstacle to readability, among other things. If one uses mongodb (popular on node.js), and one needs multiple queries to 'join' several documents, the cascade of callbacks is an obstacle to readability, let alone debugging.

If you're writing a cascade of callbacks then just use promises. There's no reason to be needing to cascade callbacks pretty much all libraries now support promises and the rest can be promisified.

I'm not calling it a Panacea but Promises are idiomatic Node Javascript now and there's almost no reason for mutliple levels of nested callbacks anymore.

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