Why Node.js?

For the past 6 months or so I have been totally working with nodejs and its eco-system. I do agree its blazing fast and has a very good eco-system. But I really don't believe that it is that much strong in web-development. I guess the only stable web framework is Express. But you have to do alot in it to achieve things. After researching I found Sails.js is gaining popularity and has many features out of the box. But after trying it for a month or so, I found that its very much buggy. The thing that works on my local environment does not work in production, however it has the same technology stack with same versions.

npm packages are outdated, dependencies not updated. I wonder why there is so much hype about nodejs and what it is really good at?

What would you say?

And take a look at this -> http://hapijs.com/

Node was the next big thing a few years ago, I was an evangelist by myself. Today, drawbacks and backlashes appear more and more... so if you plan to reorganize yourself or some products to node, you may just skip it.

I'm personally betting on elixir for everything that is related to "server" or "service", and Rust for when you have to be very close to the metal (or providing an optimized native function to elixir).

Using "universal"/"isomorphic" JS to build everything everywhere sounds good on paper and feels exciting at the beginning, but later you have to deal with these mountains of layers of wobbly code, when stuff begins to break badly. Not to mention that JS becomes an ugly beast of a language, crammed with loads of useful features without a thoughtful foundation. But, this is just my experience.

The trend gets accelerated because most new programmers start with javascript, or soon switch to javascript because they see it as the one language they can do "the most" with.

The fresh blood is, due to being new to programming, very explorative and curious about platforms and such drive the use of (back then) experimental tools up a lot.

I personally think that both PHP as well as javascript suffer from being designed not just with flat-out bad syntax, but also for a rather narrow use case and then being adopted widely for lack of widespread availability of other tools.

As a result they are used in places they were not expected to be used and for systems of scale that they were not intended to handle.

The backend of the future may run with node or it may run with PHP, I hope for neither. There are languages out there with more powerful and safer abstractions, with more carefully designed APIs and standard libraries that do not just clutter the global namespace, with usable import functionality from the get go and with type checking and -inference.

But that's just my two cents, I could be wrong :)

Big companies like facebook, paypal, etc are investing in javascript. Using it in places where it was never thought of e.g. "react-native"