Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Node.js is good for solving problems I don’t have

xquerywebappdev.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 61 posts

Re: Node.js is good for solving problems I don’t have

#11

Post by mikescar »

wicknicks wrote: post #9

"The problem I have is processing a lot of data quickly" It seems that the author needs something like super performant Hadoop++. Node doesn't address these problems. "Node enthusiasts are front-end coders not wanting to do server coding" I think he missed the point there. Using Javascript as a server side language, node has bridged a gap so many web programmers have been crossing. With node and mongodb, JSON is a la…

> With node and mongodb, JSON is a language native to the entire webstack -- which is a very powerful idea. We are able to sync datastructures across server and client now.

Honest question here -- outside of not calling input and output transforms to or from JSON and native array/list/whatever, what is the new ability and the powerful idea? Aren't the two transforms pretty insignificant in practice?

Re: Node.js is good for solving problems I don’t have

#12

Post by MostAwesomeDude »

shuzchen wrote: post #8
shtylman wrote: post #3

Troll. Post made no sense and came to no conclusion. "The content server should not need to do hardly any IO. Why would an HTML content server need to write to the filesystem?" This just shows a blatant lack of knowledge about what constitues IO. FYI, network is IO, writing to console is IO, logging is IO. The point of an evented system like node (and others based around the 'select' or 'epoll' type calls is that you…

Post also shows a blatant lack of knowledge about what an event loop is. Node and Tornado (two event-loop based servers) are by design single-threaded. This is because for certain setups, having a separate thread for each connected client (the norm for something like Apache) can destroy your server. IMO the main problem that event loop systems were designed to solve was the "I have a ton of people connected concurren…

Yes and no. The problem solved by event loops is the problem solved by select(): You never want to wait for a single person to do something; you want to wait for anybody to do anything.

Re: Node.js is good for solving problems I don’t have

#13

Post by nakkiel »

mikescar wrote: post #11
wicknicks wrote: post #9

"The problem I have is processing a lot of data quickly" It seems that the author needs something like super performant Hadoop++. Node doesn't address these problems. "Node enthusiasts are front-end coders not wanting to do server coding" I think he missed the point there. Using Javascript as a server side language, node has bridged a gap so many web programmers have been crossing. With node and mongodb, JSON is a la…

> With node and mongodb, JSON is a language native to the entire webstack -- which is a very powerful idea. We are able to sync datastructures across server and client now. Honest question here -- outside of not calling input and output transforms to or from JSON and native array/list/whatever, what is the new ability and the powerful idea? Aren't the two transforms pretty insignificant in practice?

Agreed. But even "not calling input and output transforms" is incorrect. JSON, just like XML or the next thing we will come up with, has to be parsed to be any use. This may happen under the hood but this is still happening.

I guess what mikescar finds attractive is the illusion that things are "integrated" and talking to each other in a format that doesn't look like one (it seems to be part of the programming language).

Re: Node.js is good for solving problems I don’t have

#14

Post by MostAwesomeDude »

wicknicks wrote: post #9

"The problem I have is processing a lot of data quickly" It seems that the author needs something like super performant Hadoop++. Node doesn't address these problems. "Node enthusiasts are front-end coders not wanting to do server coding" I think he missed the point there. Using Javascript as a server side language, node has bridged a gap so many web programmers have been crossing. With node and mongodb, JSON is a la…

You have solved a problem that didn't exist -- XML and HTML were both reasonable linguafrancas prior to JSON's invention.

JavaScript as a server-side langauge is not a good thing; JavaScript is not a good systems language. We've already had an era of a poor systems language (PHP) being predominant in the web application space, and the conclusion was that there are better languages which can more effectively represent both general systems tasks, and specialized web tasks.

NoSQL databases will never be relational DBs because they explicitly eschew the relational algebra that powers the latter. Similarly, Node isn't a serious server-side solution explicitly because of its reliance on JavaScript.

Finally, I should point out that JSON isn't a subset of JavaScript. This means that you can't exec it as JavaScript in all cases, and even if you could, exec/eval is massively dangerous and should be avoided. This means that you're parsing JSON, which means that you no longer have an advantage over other languages -- Perl, Python, and Ruby all have very strong JSON support. (Python even has it in its standard library now.)

Re: Node.js is good for solving problems I don’t have

#15

Post by MostAwesomeDude »

viscanti wrote: post #6

His biggest problem seems to be the "community". There's certainly some people doing projects in node who would probably benefit from doing it with something else. But to judge the framework by some "community" is silly. The node community seems friendly and helpful and have created a large library to help do things node is good at.

If Twisted, Event Machine, Rails, libevent, httpd, nginx, and Mongrel are all judged by their communities, then why does Node get a free pass?

Re: Node.js is good for solving problems I don’t have

#16

Post by nakkiel »

MostAwesomeDude wrote: post #14
wicknicks wrote: post #9

"The problem I have is processing a lot of data quickly" It seems that the author needs something like super performant Hadoop++. Node doesn't address these problems. "Node enthusiasts are front-end coders not wanting to do server coding" I think he missed the point there. Using Javascript as a server side language, node has bridged a gap so many web programmers have been crossing. With node and mongodb, JSON is a la…

You have solved a problem that didn't exist -- XML and HTML were both reasonable linguafrancas prior to JSON's invention. JavaScript as a server-side langauge is not a good thing; JavaScript is not a good systems language. We've already had an era of a poor systems language (PHP) being predominant in the web application space, and the conclusion was that there are better languages which can more effectively represent…

Regarding Javascript, I think it suits well the async paradigm because that's how people expect Javascript to be.

Why isn't Javascript a good server-side language?

Re: Node.js is good for solving problems I don’t have

#17

Post by nakkiel »

MostAwesomeDude wrote: post #12
shuzchen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post also shows a blatant lack of knowledge about what an event loop is. Node and Tornado (two event-loop based servers) are by design single-threaded. This is because for certain setups, having a separate thread for each connected client (the norm for something like Apache) can destroy your server. IMO the main problem that event loop systems were designed to solve was the "I have a ton of people connected concurren…

Yes and no. The problem solved by event loops is the problem solved by select(): You never want to wait for a single person to do something; you want to wait for anybody to do anything .

You certainly mean "the problem solved by select() alternatives such as kqueue(), epoll(), etc..". :)

Re: Node.js is good for solving problems I don’t have

#18

Post by ksetyadi »

MostAwesomeDude wrote: post #15
viscanti wrote: post #6

His biggest problem seems to be the "community". There's certainly some people doing projects in node who would probably benefit from doing it with something else. But to judge the framework by some "community" is silly. The node community seems friendly and helpful and have created a large library to help do things node is good at.

If Twisted, Event Machine, Rails, libevent, httpd, nginx, and Mongrel are all judged by their communities, then why does Node get a free pass?

If the community is the problem, I think he should focus on the community itself rather than discussing on what Nodejs is incapable of.

Re: Node.js is good for solving problems I don’t have

#20

Post by htilford »

MostAwesomeDude wrote: post #14
wicknicks wrote: post #9

"The problem I have is processing a lot of data quickly" It seems that the author needs something like super performant Hadoop++. Node doesn't address these problems. "Node enthusiasts are front-end coders not wanting to do server coding" I think he missed the point there. Using Javascript as a server side language, node has bridged a gap so many web programmers have been crossing. With node and mongodb, JSON is a la…

You have solved a problem that didn't exist -- XML and HTML were both reasonable linguafrancas prior to JSON's invention. JavaScript as a server-side langauge is not a good thing; JavaScript is not a good systems language. We've already had an era of a poor systems language (PHP) being predominant in the web application space, and the conclusion was that there are better languages which can more effectively represent…

What part of JSON isn't a subset of JavaScript?

"JSON is a subset of the object literal notation of JavaScript. Since JSON is a subset of JavaScript, it can be used in the language with no muss or fuss." http://www.json.org/js.html

Post reply on HN