Is Node.js suitable?

[Alan Tham]

Hi!

I would like some advice before I start a website in Node.js.

I am starting to build a website for customers to answer a lot of questions. This web site throws out the questions and when the user submits an answer, the website will check the answer from a database and return it to the customer. 

The website will keep track of the scores of the customers in the database.

It is estimated to have a lot of customers from different countries. I heard about Node.js being non blocking and it is fast.

Is Node.js suitable? I am coming from a Java foundation.

Please advise. Feel free to ask me more questions if necessary.

Thanks.

[// ravi]

On Jun 11, 2014, at 2:58 AM, Alan Tham <alank...@gmail.com> wrote:

I am starting to build a website for customers to answer a lot of questions. This web site throws out the questions and when the user submits an answer, the website will check the answer from a database and return it to the customer. 

The website will keep track of the scores of the customers in the database.

It is estimated to have a lot of customers from different countries. I heard about Node.js being non blocking and it is fast.

Is Node.js suitable? I am coming from a Java foundation.

Please advise. Feel free to ask me more questions if necessary.

Alan,

yes, NodeJS is suitable for this sort of application, but the answer gets more ambiguous if you ask if it’s the best option for you. Your application could be served by Apache/Nginx+PHP/Perl/Python… I am not sure NodeJS offers something for you that these others do not, though there is indeed the advantage you mention of the thoroughgoing non-blocking nature of Node.

Personally, I think there are general advantages to NodeJS that make it preferable to these alternatives for *most* [web] applications: a single client and server side language, and that language being JavaScript, not some heavy-handed OO beast, the Unix-like intuitive and lightweight nature of the Node ecosystem, etc. Big complex languages and frameworks scare me, but not so others.

I will caution though that some of the feeling of being lightweight is deceptive, and you will find yourself stymied at times by the need to seek out and cobble together primitives, the sparse documentation and some of the leaky abstractions of the New Jersey approach (*). It’s a learning experience.

Regards,

—ravi

(*) http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs240/readings/worse-is-better.html

[Floby]

Node.js would be suitable, but probably not the best option out there.

If you're gonna generate HTML pages with templating, and interfacing with a SQL database, other technologies have it better. Look for Rails, Spring and such.

[Matt]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 2:58 AM, Alan Tham <alank...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is Node.js suitable? I am coming from a Java foundation.

Yes but so would Java be.

FWIW we're just rolling out almost exactly what you describe, built on Node, but as Ravi rightly points out, it could have been done in Ruby (our MVP was), Perl, PHP or Java just as well.

Matt.