Woohooo! Node.js!

2012-10-01

This is odd, I have not been so exited about learning a new technology, than node.js. I really tried many things, Lisp, Python, Ruby, openAL, openGL, Ruby on Rails, aspect oriented programing, Django, Flask, Drupal, HTML5, pure C and many more, but all where at best a "hmm, interesting". In most cases I was looking for a tool for a task and picked up the things that people where talking about.

If you forage in the archive of this journal you will see that C++ is my language of choice and there are very few other languages that I consider usefull. My rationale is that, C++ is a powerfull and strong laguage and any other language must offer a significant gain in functionality to warant the penaly of a virtual machine or runtime safty checks.

Why is node.js so awsome?!

At first node is hard to wrap your head around. It sounds feeble with Java Script as the core technology. But since I know that Java Script is the most misunderstod language in the world and I seriously worked on integrating Spider Monkey into some of my (failed) game engine projects.

What really is revelutionary is the way that almost everything is handled asyncronously. The obvious ones, such as waiting on I/O, are handled this way, but also other aspects, such as a HTTP server handling function. What makes this revelitionary is the way in which Java Scripts closures make it totally pain less and readable to implement.

This leads to the wierd fact, that node is single threaded but many locgical threads do things. Not only does it results in a very efficient use of CPU time, but it also makes programing really simple. No need for locking primitives, you only have one thread.

What is also interesting is that node solves many scalability issues. If you can distribute tasks between multiple instances of node, putting these instances on multiple serves becomes tivial.

What is also nice is the large and open NPM reporitory and NPM in general. This is not such a big deal and I con not tell you why I think NPM is great and Python's PIP evokes only "meh". But one of the killer featues is that, by default NPM installs the dependencies locally, based on your package.json file. This makes node applications extreamly portable, since no globaly installed dependencies are required, save node itsself.

Try node.js, it is great. But take this advice with a grain of salt, as always.