This is the first post in a series of 3 about my experiences with Node.js. I will follow up with posts that including my experiences porting a RESTful service from Java, some benchmarks comparing the Node.js service and the Java service and my final thoughts from these experiences.
Node.js has become somewhat of a buzz word in the tech space over the last year or so. The term “Node” has almost become synonymous with server-side JavaScript. More and more managers are talking and raising questions about Node.js. With it growing in popularity and having a stable API, it seems like a great time to dive in and research it. I think my boss wanted to take on this research task, but I kinda stole it from him while he was on vacation. Yeah, I am a geek like that.
If you aren’t familiar with Node.js, it is a JavaScript-based application platform created by Joyent, Inc. Their website describes it as “…a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.” Not bad for tech geek marketing speak. Read more…