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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

#151

Post by eagsalazar2 »

Corrado wrote: post #147

I agree with this article and find the Node.js community, and to a lesser extent Javascript itself, exhausting. It seems like every 2 minutes there is a "more" proper way to do something, which tells me that the architecture is not yet mature, even though it's pretty old by now. On a related note, it seems like every time you find something that doesn't quite work correctly or conveniently in Node.js there is a "fix"…

Yes, the Javascript world is quickly evolving both on the front end and backend, and of course that can be exhausting but I have to disagree with both conclusions that (a) this means the tech is immature, and (b) the community's readiness to make changes is "holding it back".

The js world is very unique in its ability to evolve quickly and things have improved massively over the last few years. Now, apart from the churn itself and precisely because of that rapid evolution, front end and backend development in javascript is amazing compared to most other options (especially on the front end). So while you do have to be realistic about the cost of the evolving ecosystem, it is just a tradeoff for rapid progress, not a flaw.

If you crave stability, agreed, this rollercoaster probably isn't your ride. But the evolution of node, the emergence of react/redux, es6, etc is amazing and beautiful IMO and I'm totally enjoying every bit of it compared to the staid mediocrity of my Rails, C/C++, and Java history.

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

#152

Post by gedrap »

The only clear, objective advantage of using nodejs is that if your application is I/O heavy (e.g. tons of sql queries which can be executed in parallel), nodejs event system is helpful and everything you need is pretty much out of the box. Other thing... it largely depends on personal taste and a matter of convention.

Reading his "Why I’m switching from Python to Node.js", doesn't seem like he was having an issue with that. And I don't really buy into the "same language everywhere" argument because come on, how hard is it to learn python, ruby, etc enough so that you can be productive? Not hard at all, unless you have hundreds of cubicles filled with drones.

Anyway, it's good to see that he made some reasonable conclusions after the experiment. That's a good sign :)

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

#153

Post by CJefferson »

kansface wrote: post #119
uptownJimmy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking only for myself, a middle-weight .NET dev who was, not too long ago, working desperately to find my footing in all this: 1. I think the learning curve to doing good work with Node is really shallow at first, and then it quickly gets almost vertical. 2. I think that ALL of the other server-side language/framework combos (Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, C#/.NET, PHP/Symfony, etc.) make it significantly easier for a…

> 2. I think that ALL of the other server-side language/framework combos (Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, C#/.NET, PHP/Symfony, etc.) make it significantly easier for a "merely-good" dev to make really good Web applications. All of those frameworks are threaded/synchronous - they are maybe 10 times easier to use and potentially 100x slower (less concurrent) than Node. The ruby equivalent isn't rails, its eventmachine. Mov…

I haven't found the overhead of threaded frameworks to be anywhere close to that -- in practice it can be close to even, maybe 2x slower.

And a big advantage of threaded is that it is (obviously) easier to scale to multiple CPUs, and I don't have to worry about one connection taking more than a handful of milliseconds and jamming up my server.

Node is fine, but I feel many of the speed benefits come from V8 vs cpython, rather than threaded vs async

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

#154

Post by imafish »

paulddraper wrote: post #134
joshmanders wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't that the case basically all the time? No, ES5 to ES2015 is a HUGE leap. ES2015 to ES2016 is a very minor jump as it only adds 2 new things to the spec. > Which is a perfectly suitable reason to avoid it at all costs except for the bare minimum required for front-end.. And honestly, that is not my job to tell you not to do. If you want to avoid Node.js go ahead. I feel Java is something I should avoid at all c…

Naturally. That's a jump of 2010 compared to 1

Good one :D

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

#155

Post by Kequc »

Corrado wrote: post #147

I agree with this article and find the Node.js community, and to a lesser extent Javascript itself, exhausting. It seems like every 2 minutes there is a "more" proper way to do something, which tells me that the architecture is not yet mature, even though it's pretty old by now. On a related note, it seems like every time you find something that doesn't quite work correctly or conveniently in Node.js there is a "fix"…

I'm still not all the way on board with promises - from the sounds of it this article says there is already a successor down the pipe.

As you've pointed out some of these libraries make things behave a lot more similarly to other languages. And in such a case you may be better off just using one of them. However you're giving up on a lot of the power and benefits javascript provides, so of course you'd want to use something else.

For all of its pitfalls and annoyances, javascript is too powerful a language to ignore. Asynchronous operations and streams are just too good. They are difficult to balance but once mastered you can really do a lot with them.

My recommendation would be to skip libraries where possible. Use raw ES6, or Typescript. Something javascript has been suffering from for a long time is bloat from external libraries. You don't really need to use them, especially now that the language has more or less settled down.

All of the best libraries were used to normalise things and that's not really needed anymore.

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

#156

Post by ralusek »

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…

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. "Async situation needs to settle down"...? "Completely unacceptable to write code with promises"?

Look at the following code: https://paste.ee/r/LJnhg

I have function requestFromService and another readFromDB. On a single thread, I issue one request to a service and one to the database server, and you think it makes sense for the thread to just wait around? In javascript, the second I issue those two requests, the thread is available to now serve the next incoming request or do literally anything else while those services take as long or as little as they need.

The code itself could not be more clear as to what will happen, except for maybe the syntax Promise.join(), which was only there to illustrate how easy it is to do concurrent, asynchronous tasks.

You don't have to think twice about what to do while those requests carry out, and it's not like you had to write your code in a complex manner to take advantage of the asynchronous nature of JS, it just inherently works that way. Maybe I have gone and served 5 more requests while the db server was responding, and I didn't have to even be aware of the concurrency whatsoever.

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

#157

Post by eagsalazar2 »

eva1984 wrote: post #12
joshmanders wrote: post #9

These 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…

Yeah, so some js devs might need to stop overselling javascript to everyone, pretending it is the one language that people are waiting for years...Just saying.

Strawman.

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

#158

Post by MichaelGG »

gedrap wrote: post #152

The only clear, objective advantage of using nodejs is that if your application is I/O heavy (e.g. tons of sql queries which can be executed in parallel), nodejs event system is helpful and everything you need is pretty much out of the box. Other thing... it largely depends on personal taste and a matter of convention. Reading his "Why I’m switching from Python to Node.js", doesn't seem like he was having an issue wi…

Same language, in theory, is great. Reuse structure definitions. Reuse rendering logic or even validation logic (perform checks on both, but make it easy to get into client-side). In general, keeping things "in sync".

Also can make it easier to write in SPA style but offload rendering to the server when you need it (particularly first-page or reloads).

Whether or not tooling is good enough to allow this (either with JS or compilers) is another issue.

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

#159

Post by MichaelGG »

Kequc wrote: post #155
Corrado wrote: post #147

I agree with this article and find the Node.js community, and to a lesser extent Javascript itself, exhausting. It seems like every 2 minutes there is a "more" proper way to do something, which tells me that the architecture is not yet mature, even though it's pretty old by now. On a related note, it seems like every time you find something that doesn't quite work correctly or conveniently in Node.js there is a "fix"…

I'm still not all the way on board with promises - from the sounds of it this article says there is already a successor down the pipe. As you've pointed out some of these libraries make things behave a lot more similarly to other languages. And in such a case you may be better off just using one of them. However you're giving up on a lot of the power and benefits javascript provides, so of course you'd want to use so…

How is JavaScript so special with async and streams? JS lacks any syntax for async, so it's not on par with languages that do. What's special there? Same for streams: they're implementable in any language, and JS has no special capability there. Or am I unaware of something JS has that other languages lack (besides popularity)?

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

#160

Post by spriggan3 »

narrator wrote: post #82

I'm using NodeJS on a pretty big project. Things I like: * Async libraries make it easy to make things high performance. * I like Sequelize as an ORM, once I figured out how the async everything works. * The testing support is pretty good, both mocha and e2e testing using selenium * The angular-fullstack generator was really helpful for getting started and setting up the deploy to Heroku. * everything is open source.…

> * I like Sequelize as an ORM, once I figured out how the async everything works.

Sequelize is painfully slow unfortunately, I don't mean a bit slow like most ORMs I mean really really slow. It shouldn't be used in production.

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