Node.js is not suitable for generic web projects (I)
Part I • Part II • Part III • Part IV • Part V
"Node.js is only suitable for writing small APIs, not for serious web sites or web applications".
This is bull*hit. I have to say it.
I've heard it and read it so many times it bores me to tears. Most of the times it comes from people who didn't really use it for anything else besides replicating the basic "todo" tutorial, or from "pseudo-developers" or "tech smarties" who like to surf and read a lot about what's hot in the trends, but don't have much "serious" code of their own to show.
Well, there's a brave new world out there that appears to think just the opposite. Like the guys from Klout, Geeklist, Transloadit, Cloud9, and many others featured on this page.
They can't all be wrong, can they?...
But still, where does the unfounded myth come from?
Outdated reviews
First of all, despite its increasingly fast adoption rate, Node.js is a (still) young technology. It's not immature anymore, but it's still evolving fast, fast enough that the marketing hype and the technical articles aren't keeping up with it. In fact, most of the articles / forum threads explaining or debating what Node.js is good for and what's not are very much outdated.
Written by Ionut-Cristian Florescu
Related protips
21 Responses
Sorry for having to break it up into 5 parts, but apparently there's a limit on the text size somewhere...
Hey @icflorescu thanks for saying this.
There is so much irrational hate (group behavior) going around this topic (specially here at coderwall ) that is hard to stay objective.
I'll have to try ICS for my next project thanks for the tip :)
Hi David,
Thanks for taking the time to read. I know about the irrational hate... But people can be irrational about many things :-).
If you're not against CoffeeScript, you should definitely try ICS!
"Sorry for having to break it up into 5 parts, but apparently there's a limit on the text size somewhere..."
Yes and there is a good reason for that: Because this is a site for short tips and not a blogging engine. Sorry, I think I agree with your post but it just does not belong here...
@chris089 - thanks for reading and you're right, of course, sorry about that. I'll try to keep them shorter from now on.
Initially, it was supposed to be shorter, however, you can regard it as a "collection of related tips" :-).
However, there's an UX problem here - there's no message / error feedback about the content length when you're trying to publish...
I love node and I the lack of stable platforms is not because node itself but the slow adoption in hosting solutions. And Why didn't you wrote a blog post and linked here? Saves the work of posting five parts and an apology
Thank you for this! I love Node. It's definitely my preferred programming language as of the last few years.
The problem isn't specifically node.js, the problem is JavaScript, which is a half-assed programming language. Better than PHP, but still.
Just FYI. Coderwall isn't for articles of this format. You might want to look into Medium or something similar
This is one of the best reads I came across on Coderwall so far, really like the effort you put into this! nice work
@marcoslhc: Thanks for reading!
In relation to hosting providers, in my opinion AppFog is a good choice, while Heroku is an EXCELLENT one; I haven't tried Joyent yet, but I've heard only good things about them. And there are many others...
@zilti: "JavaScript, which is a half-assed programming language" - the Internet is (still :-) a democratic environment and each one is entitled to an opinion. I've used C#, Java, PHP and JavaScript. They're just tools, not religions, and all of them have strengths and weaknesses :-)...
@mattnull - Mine too, I think! Though I'd say it's more of a platform, not a language...
@christian-fei - thank you for your kind words!
@icflorescu Yes, but I just can't understand why anyone would want to use it server-side. It's... ok for browser programming, but on the server there are so many awesome alternatives to quirky js. Sure, use what you want, it's your choice.
"It's... ok for browser programming" - there's no other real alternative yet for browser-programming.
"can't understand why anyone would want to use it server-side" - that's precisely the main theme of the article. There are many reasons; a good foundation for speed and the ability to handle many concurrent users at a decent cost being one of them. I remember working on a RoR project where we had to do some image uploading and processing (on a regular, cheap PaaS hosting solution) and we were having issues on that part. We're having no such problems with Node.js.
"use what you want, it's your choice" - indeed :-).
Thank you for reading and for your feedback!
generator will be the better solution in the future :p....no more callback hell.
Too much spam in Coderwall comments lately :-(...
My question is how node.js to connect database, how node.js to parse xml, how node.js to handle message, to call third party libaray, like creating pdf, handling pictures...
All the e-commerce companies are shifting towards NodeJS platform .... Because of its performance . Although Lua scripts are better, but Node's V8 Engine is currently most powerful ... If you want to use node in practical model MVC architecture ,..... You may use Sails.js which is popular lately . It gives ease for working with node ....
