I'm going to alternate between articles on Node and my selector engine series. Not to worry dear reader, part two of the continuing selector engine saga will continue shortly, but I thought I would address something that's been bothering me. It seems to me that Node JS is going to revolutionize web application development once it hits 1.0. My main reason for thinking this (aside from the limited technical information I'm able to grasp) is that a lot of smart people say it will. I know that some people have railed against it for certain reasons, but the reasons they suggest seem hallow to me, especially the computational one. If you are getting your framework to do continuous computations of your data as it receives it from its database than you're doing something wrong, Hadoop was invented because of this problem. Node is an I/O handler not a computational maven. That being said, it seems to me that there are two groups of people programming for Node right now. Those who know JavaScript very well and are just starting to beef up there server-side chops, and those who know the server very well and are excited about Node (for things like the non-blocking event loop, and yes I have accepted epoll into my heart, etc) and are just embarking upon their JavaScript journey. Both groups have one very similar disadvantage, they both have or will have bad JavaScript prejudices built up around a JavaScript programming paradigm that has been the result of its use in the most torn up API landscape in computer science history: the Browser.
JavaScript programming best practices have been built up around a very feckless set of APIs. When programming for "the Browser", you're not just programming for one API (in theory you are), you are actually programming for many that look somewhat similar. This model of hack and burn programming works well for the Browser and has produced some of the most imaginative and ingenious code ever created. However, this model and paradigm of JavaScript programming is inherently broken when approaching a coherent and unified API like Node JS. Read More →Browse the Archive for more posts.