Node.js

I read this morning about a new beta book from O'Reilly Up and Running With Node. Before skimming through the beta book, I took a half hour to review the standard Node.js Manual & Documentation. The beta book is very nice (recommended!) and I especially enjoyed the discusion about using the Node REPL. I was lucky enough to have received a Heroku Node beta invitation last year but so far all I have done with Node is to build new versions every few months and play with the examples in the documentation. I think that this is worth the time, even though I have a very full consulting schedule, because Javascript is probably going to become popular for server side development as it already is for browser development. This will happen because of the efficiency of V8, the ability to share code between server and client side, and the inherent scalability of event, rather than multiple thread systems.

Comments

  1. Unknown5:15 AM

    Is the promised scalability there with Node.js though?

    http://docs.yesodweb.com/blog/preliminary-warp-cross-language-benchmarks

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  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant7:24 AM

    Hello Steven, I can't speak from personal experience because I have been in play mode, not deploy mode. One possible issue with the benchmark you linked: it says it is a "pong" benchmark which makes me think that there is no processing delay associated with handling requests. I understand that event driven systems like Node excel at use cases where there are real processing delays like hitting an external database; Node does not have to use a thread to wait for responses from (for example) a database call.

    -Mark

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