61–70 of 110 posts
Node was the best choice for our service, I'm willing to go to court with this. We need a fast fire and forget server to talk with Redis continuously, what's a better option? Erlang? I think there are ~3.6 developers in Israel that know Erlang.
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If you've spent any appreciable amount of time on Hacker News, you'd know that there has been pretty big hype behind Node.js. If you don't see it, you're not paying attention. Anecdotally, I work with a lot of fairly inexperienced developers with my clients, and I honestly can't tell you how many times they've suggested we "rewrite (x) in Node.js because it's faster" or "let's switch this to Redis" with no real reaso…
"When one digs down, we eventually arrive at "I read a blog post that said it was real fast and stuff."" That doesn't show that there was too much hype. That just shows there is enough popularity for an inexperienced developer to find it on their radar. If it was overly hyped, you'd find a lot of experienced developers blogging about how they were horribly mislead and that node doesn't do what it advertises.
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All else isn't the same. For one, this event-based, single-threaded "asynchronous" execution environment running on a dynamic language uses javascript , which is a surprisingly powerful functional language that just happens to run on the other side of the web server conversation in the context that we are discussing. Being able to standardize and coalesce the two sides of the web pipeline -- regardless of what magic…
Calling JavaScript a functional language on the pure basis that it has first class functions and closures is sort of stupid. Aside from that, what other properties does JS enforce that are deemed functional? I'll save you some time: none.
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I considered EventMachine and Twisted and decided to go with Node. 90% of the requests to the server will be "take this and push it to redis". Another factor in the decision was the other programmer on the project doesn't know Ruby or Python. Another factor was that I'm young, not constrained, and I want to learn everything I can get my hands on.
Sure, that all sounds great. I'm not trying to say you made a bad decision. You're original comment, though, came off as overly forceful, and a mild-bit condescending to the erlang community for no apparent reason and I decided to put my 2 cents in about it. There's no reason why your exact service couldn't be written in another language other than pure personal preference. And thats fine but you need to loosen up a…
This happens with every popular new tech that does things differently from how its been done before. Since I've been developing I've seen it happen with
PHP
Rails
mongodb
now node.js
As long as there is a critical mass of developers that want to use a certain technology, there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it. They'll keep making it better and better until the naysayers have little or nothing they can criticize, and then it won't matter because everyone will be using it anyway.
Its great to see people stepping out to tamp down the hype though, that's the necessary next step in the evolution of any new tech.
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What hype? Whose hype? I think it's a strawman. There is a certain class of problem that often appears on the web presentation layer -- the interaction between the browser and a cornucopia of back-end sources and systems -- where nodejs is often a very good fit, and it is almost always what enthusiasts of the platform are speaking of. That's it. Nothing more. I've seen various angry retorts that opine that become it…
If you do not already think it has been hyped, I am at a loss as to how to prove it to you. Let me put it this way: Why do we hear so much about Node when it's just another event-based single-threaded "asynchronous" execution environment running on a dynamic language, like half-a-dozen others that preceded it? Basically, it won the hype lottery. Whatever nice things you may have to say about it apply reasonably well…
I think a lot of the criticism about people getting into it thinking that they can just port their client side experience to the server is valid. But the tone of so many seemingly anti-node posts turns a lot people off. I read more critical posts about node than I do positive ones because I know I will learn more. But sometimes it is not easy to cut through all the ego thumping and noob bashing. It would be nice to see the tone of the discussion shift, which I think it is starting to do, to what node is actually good at (in my opinion it seems to be acting as a glue for applications that require real-time).
Regardless, it works. I've started using Trello and I love it. Best organizational app I have used. Built in node. It works and I have not had a single problem with after two weeks of pretty heavy use.
So I don't think it just won the hype lottery, it has distinct advantages over Twisted and EventMachine, even if many of those advantages just have to do with relative accessibility and the ease of access provided by NPM.
It has hype because it has an involved and open community. Not just because it was lucky.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win --- Gandhi This happens with every popular new tech that does things differently from how its been done before. Since I've been developing I've seen it happen with PHP Rails mongodb now node.js As long as there is a critical mass of developers that want to use a certain technology, there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it. They'll…
Just wanted to point out the apples to oranges comparison being made: The article argues that node's sweet-spot is: "to enable real-time propagation of events and state-changes between clients. You could do the same thing with long-polling ajax or even frequent polling, but those both come with the cost of tying up unnecessary worker threads on the server and dealing with extra requests." yes we all know that, that i…
Using node.js for server side programming is a new trend which is common around people who only know Javascript, and choose node.js because it's a language they know. This is a HUGE problem, because even though node.js has a huge community, it seems they do not learn from the mistakes of older and more experienced languages. They just try to re-invent everything, which results in crappy systems.