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I finally escaped Node

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Re: I finally escaped Node

#41

Post by tekknik »

sradman wrote: post #9

The article focuses on server-side Node, rather than its role as a CLI tool. Compared to V8, Ruby, Python, and PHP are not performant. Node’s libuv network library was highly concurrent and Node built single-core concurrency into the runtime and libraries; multi-core concurrency, however, is not best-of-class. IMO, Ryan Dahl made two fundamental mistakes in both Node and Deno that make them uncompetitive for simple s…

> No web Gateway Interface like WSGI and Rack

It uses http, which is much more standardized, used and accepted than Rack or WSGI. I can chain together http servers, use graphql http redirectors, etc. With WSGI and Rack you’d need a fronting web server to terminate and translate.

> No DBMS API/SPI like JDBC.

Covered this in another comment.

> Express was supposed to be a Microframework like Sinatra and Flask but developers have to spend most of their time defining a robust web server.

Doesn’t this mean it is a microframework? As opposed to something like Django that has everything included?

> Since the http server and app code are tightly integrated, 12-Factor Apps or JSON API Microservices are more complicated than they need to be in Node.

If you are serving up an express app directly with no fronting load balancer then perhaps they are tightly integrated. Otherwise they are not. Express does not and should not handle load balancing.

Re: I finally escaped Node

#43

Post by haolez »

cygned wrote: post #19

We went away from node as a backend technology for a bunch of reasons. Here's a list of the biggest pain points: - Lack of a good standard API; compared to environments like Java, C# or Go, node's standard library is significantly sparse. - The tendency for small libraries/frameworks leads to a very high number of third party code with all the problems attached; bigger attack surface, licensing challenges, it's econo…

How do you feel about the impact on developer productivity after migrating to Java + Spring Boot? I haven't used Java in a long while and every time that I try to come back to it, I get driven away by the difficulty and complexity to do simple things (thinking of annotations, dependency injection, complicated design patterns). It feels like an effort of one hour of Node or Python programming (or even Go) would take 10x more in Java.

Re: I finally escaped Node

#44

Post by luftbbb »

cygned wrote: post #19

We went away from node as a backend technology for a bunch of reasons. Here's a list of the biggest pain points: - Lack of a good standard API; compared to environments like Java, C# or Go, node's standard library is significantly sparse. - The tendency for small libraries/frameworks leads to a very high number of third party code with all the problems attached; bigger attack surface, licensing challenges, it's econo…

Shock horror - java script is still for script kiddies

Re: I finally escaped Node

#45

Post by ducharmdev »

argvargc wrote: post #25
marshmellman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is refactoring? I was considering moving from Node to Elixir, but now that I’m using TypeScript it does feel like I would be giving something up. It’s a breeze to make broad changes knowing the compiler will prevent me from missing a code path, etc.

I'm only just starting with Elixir, but my impression so far is that I will be refactoring a lot less, due to the way Elixir encourages simple and elegant approaches to many of the common problems a programmer faces. In node for example, I'm refactoring constantly (or, at least, should be...) because I keep backing myself into cognitive and developmental corners by using a kind of brick-by-brick approach that is perh…

Do you have any concrete examples you can link to show these differences? I'm unsure what you mean by architectural decisions made at the language level.

Re: I finally escaped Node

#46

Post by jillesvangurp »

cygned wrote: post #19

We went away from node as a backend technology for a bunch of reasons. Here's a list of the biggest pain points: - Lack of a good standard API; compared to environments like Java, C# or Go, node's standard library is significantly sparse. - The tendency for small libraries/frameworks leads to a very high number of third party code with all the problems attached; bigger attack surface, licensing challenges, it's econo…

Agreed. I've been on a few projects where other people were doing node.js. It's fine but my take away from that experience is to not use it for something that matters and that it's rarely the best tool for the job. These projects have a tendency to get ugly in a hurry.

The good news is you can do real stuff with it relatively easy and that all you need to know is javascript. Which is great if you have some frontend people getting their feet wet with backend stuff. But most of what it does you can do in other tech stacks as well and they tend to be pretty good at the stuff node is used for.

Go is decent. Python is decent (forget about threading though, global interpreter lock is still a thing). I use a lot of Kotlin & Spring Boot myself. There are many other tech stacks. Each of those has rich ecosystems with great libraries, frameworks, tooling, etc. Whether you are doing batch jobs, data engineering, server code, etc. They each have many options for technology.

Re: I finally escaped Node

#47

Post by int_19h »

tekknik wrote: post #38
phpnode wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because otherwise you end up with thousands of incomplete and incompatible implementations all fighting to be the best or running out of steam after a month or two. Node is a hellscape from a db perspective

Most people have moved on from ORMs and the like, since most DBs are not SQL anymore and supporting all of the different DB types is just too hard.

"Most DBs" by what metric? If you count them as products, you're probably correct. But I seriously doubt that is true when adjusted for usage - say, number of requests per second, globally, across all deployed databases worldwide.

(in fact, I suspect that SQLite would win that contest handily.)

Re: I finally escaped Node

#48

Post by cygned »

haolez wrote: post #43
cygned wrote: post #19

We went away from node as a backend technology for a bunch of reasons. Here's a list of the biggest pain points: - Lack of a good standard API; compared to environments like Java, C# or Go, node's standard library is significantly sparse. - The tendency for small libraries/frameworks leads to a very high number of third party code with all the problems attached; bigger attack surface, licensing challenges, it's econo…

How do you feel about the impact on developer productivity after migrating to Java + Spring Boot? I haven't used Java in a long while and every time that I try to come back to it, I get driven away by the difficulty and complexity to do simple things (thinking of annotations, dependency injection, complicated design patterns). It feels like an effort of one hour of Node or Python programming (or even Go) would take 1…

Great question. I was very concerned about that, too. I strongly recommend learning Domain Driven Design before diving into Spring, you will recognize a lot of patterns and it then makes sense how things work. Even things like having an interface + an implementation for basically everything becomes apparent. I had a lot of bad experience with Spring and Jakarta EE in the past, but I can assure you Spring Boot does a fantastic job here.

Point being, it is an enterprise setup and in enterprise applications you favor maintainability and friends over speed of development. So implementing a feature takes more files and more time, in a DDD setup you can estimate something like 1 controller method, use case + interface, >=2 DTOs, potentially a domain model if not present plus a repository + interface if not present.

So yes, it is more overhead and you have a slow down in productivity. I have no proof, but I am 95% sure that the time you save upfront in a more flexible environment like node is being paid back significantly worse when it comes to maintenance.

Edit: you can of course use Spring Boot without enterprise/DDD and hence make it simpler. It's actually pretty minimal.

Re: I finally escaped Node

#50

Post by philote »

nickjj wrote: post #40
rockyj wrote: post #20

From the title, I was expecting the article on something along the lines of how, where and why developers can move from Node.js. However the arguments are not so solid and there is no migration path. We all know Elixir is great but the adoption and maturity is low as compared to JS. Yes, Node is not perfect but (with TypeScript added) tell me a development platform that can run under 100 MB of memory, handle most req…

> tell me a development platform that can run under 100 MB of memory, handle most requests under 50 ms, can spin up a http service in a day or so and still perform well under load (and scales horizontally with ease). What about Python? Flask will happily return responses in hundreds of microseconds or low single digit milliseconds if you're just rendering HTML templates. Throw in some DB queries and it's really easy…

Or if you wanted async request handling, you could use Starlette.
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