What is Node. js I use Node. Forced to choose one word to describe Node. Id say interesting which is not a purely positive adjective. The community is vibrant and growing. Java. Script, despite its oddities can be a great language to code in. And you will daily rethink your own understanding of best practice and the patterns of well structured code. Calculus James Stewart 4Th Edition Pdf. Theres an enormous energy of ideas flowing into Node. Node. js in production is definitely possible, but far from the turn key deployment seemingly promised by the documentation. With Node. js v. 0. For a serious production service, you also need to be prepared to throttle incoming connections and do all the stuff that Apache does for PHP. To be fair, Ruby on Rails has this exact problem. It is solved via two complementary mechanisms 1 Putting Ruby on RailsNode. C and tested to hell and back like Nginx or Apache Lighttd. The webserver can efficiently serve static content, access logging, rewrite URLs, terminate SSL, enforce access rules, and manage multiple sub services. For requests that hit the actual node service, the webserver proxies the request through. Restful Web Services With Node.js And Expressions' title='Restful Web Services With Node.js And Expressions' />Using a framework like Unicorn that will manage the worker processes, recycle them periodically, etc. Ive yet to find a Node. I havent found it yet and still use 1. Reading frameworks like Express makes it seem like the standard practice is to just serve everything through one jack of all trades Node. For lower load services and development, thats probably fine. But as soon as you try to put big time load on your service and have it run 2. C code like Nginx fronting their site and handling all of the static content requests. Restful Web Services With Node.js And Expression' title='Restful Web Services With Node.js And Expression' />A new free programming tutorial book every day Develop new tech skills and knowledge with Packt Publishings daily free learning giveaway. Read the 50 most important AngularJS interview questions and answers for 100 success. And increase your chances of getting hired. Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Matlab and Mathematica, AutoCAD, CADCAM. Business Services Business Plans, Accounting, Business. CDN, like Amazon Cloud. Front. For a somewhat humorous and unabashedly negative take on this, see this guy. Node. js is also finding more and more non service uses. Even if you are using something else to serve web content, you might still use Node. Browserify to stitch it into a single asset, and uglify js to minify it for deployment. For dealing with the web, Java. Script is a perfect impedance match and frequently that makes it the easiest route of attack. For example, if you want to grovel through a bunch of JSON response payloads, you should use my underscore CLI module, the utility belt of structured data. Pros Cons Pro For a server guy, writing Java. Script on the backend has been a gateway drug to learning modern UI patterns. I no longer dread writing client code. Pro Tends to encourage proper error checking err is returned by virtually all callbacks, nagging the programmer to handle it also, async. Pro Some interesting and normally hard tasks become trivial like getting status on tasks in flight, communicating between workers, or sharing cache state. Pro Huge community and tons of great libraries based on a solid package manager npmCon Java. Script has no standard library. You get so used to importing functionality that it feels weird when you use JSON. This means that there are five versions of everything. Even the modules included in the Node. Learn how to create a Node. RESTful API and deploy it to an API app in Azure App Service. Play Framework is an opensource web application framework, written in Scala and also usable from other programming languages that are compiled to Bytecode, e. Java. This leads to rapid evolution, but also some level of confusion. Versus a simple one process per request model LAMP Pro Scalable to thousands of active connections. Very fast and very efficient. For a web fleet, this could mean a 1. X reduction in the number of boxes required versus PHP or Ruby. Pro Writing parallel patterns is easy. Imagine that you need to fetch three or N blobs from Memcached. Do this in PHP. Listing of web test tools and management tools link checking, html validation, load testing, security testing, java testing, publishing control, site mapping. Wow, thats slow. Theres a special PECL module to fix that specific problem for Memcached, but what if you want to fetch some Memcached data in parallel with your database query In Node. Con Asynchronous code is fundamentally more complex than synchronous code, and the up front learning curve can be hard for developers without a solid understanding of what concurrent execution actually means. Still, its vastly less difficult than writing any kind of multithreaded code with locking. Con If a compute intensive request runs for, for example, 1. Node. js process. AKA, cooperative multitasking. This can be mitigated with the Web Workers pattern spinning off a subprocess to deal with the expensive task. Alternatively, you could use a large number of Node. Con Running a production system is MUCH more complicated than a CGI model like Apache PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc. Unhandled exceptions will bring down the entire process, necessitating logic to restart failed workers see cluster. Modules with buggy native code can hard crash the process. Whenever a worker dies, any requests it was handling are dropped, so one buggy API can easily degrade service for other cohosted APIs. Versus writing a real service in Java C C C Pro Doing asynchronous in Node. Node. js is by far the least painful asynchronous paradigm Ive ever worked in. With good libraries, it is only slightly harder than writing synchronous code. Pro No multithreading locking bugs. True, you invest up front in writing more verbose code that expresses a proper asynchronous workflow with no blocking operations. And you need to write some tests and get the thing to work it is a scripting language and fat fingering variable names is only caught at unit test time. BUT, once you get it to work, the surface area for heisenbugs strange problems that only manifest once in a million runs that surface area is just much much lower. The taxes writing Node. Then you tend to end up with stable code. Pro Java. Script is much more lightweight for expressing functionality. Its hard to prove this with words, but JSON, dynamic typing, lambda notation, prototypal inheritance, lightweight modules, whatever. Con Maybe you really, really like coding services in JavaFor another perspective on Java. Script and Node. js, check out From Java to Node. Java developers impressions and experiences learning Node. Modules. When considering node, keep in mind that your choice of Java. Script libraries will DEFINE your experience. Most people use at least two, an asynchronous pattern helper Step, Futures, Async, and a Java. Script sugar module Underscore. Helper Java. Script Sugar Underscore. African Rhythms Mp3. Just do it. It makes your code nice and readable with stuff like. String, and. is. Array. Im not really sure how you could write safe code otherwise. Bit Che Plus Serial more. Also, for enhanced command line fu, check out my own Underscore CLI. Asynchronous Pattern Modules Step a very elegant way to express combinations of serial and parallel actions. My personal reccomendation. See my post on what Step code looks like. Futures much more flexible is that really a good thing way to express ordering through requirements. Can express things like start a, b, c in parallel. When A, and B finish, start AB. When A, and C finish, start AC. Such flexibility requires more care to avoid bugs in your workflow like never calling the callback, or calling it multiple times. See Raynoss post on using futures this is the post that made me get futures. Async more traditional library with one method for each pattern. I started with this before my religious conversion to step and subsequent realization that all patterns in Async could be expressed in Step with a single more readable paradigm.