This is the final post in a series of 3 about my first experiences with Node.js. In this post I will discuss my final thoughts from these experiences. If you haven’t read the first two articles in this series, you can view them here: Experiences with Node.js: Researching Node and Experiences with Node.js: Porting a RESTful Service Written in Java.

New Twist on Old Mature Tech

Like most technologists, I find great joy in learning new technologies… or mature technologies with a new twist. [Note that I am using mature in place of old here. I don't want anyone running away with the idea that JavaScript is old and washed up. That most certainly is not true.] Writing JavaScript applications in a context other than a browser is very interesting and proves yet again that the language is capable of so much more than showing and hiding sub-navigation menus. If you haven’t had an opportunity to pull down Node.js, I highly recommend any developer trying this out. It may drastically change the way you look at and think about JavaScript.

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This is the second post in a series of 3 about my experiences with Node.js. In this post I will discuss my experiences porting a RESTful service from Java and some basic benchmarks, comparing the Node.js service and the Java service.

If you haven’t read the first article in this series, you can view it here: Experiences with Node.js: Researching Node. My final post in this series Experiences with Node.js: Final Thoughts is now available, where I summarize my experiences, provide some feedback, and discuss my next steps with Node.js.

Since the writing of the first article in this series, there have been a few new releases to the Node.js project. You can read about these updates on the Node Blog.

Porting a Java Project

The ultimate goal in this Node.js research is to successfully port an existing RESTful service written in Java using Jersey (JAX-RS) running on Tomcat to JavaScript running on Node.js. Not only could the experience be gained of building a useful service with Node, but some basic performance testing could gain some insights to its power and the results compared. If things go well here, more time and energy could be invested into Node. Read more…

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…