How to decide when to use Node js

Question

I am new to this kind of stuff  but lately I ve been hearing a lot about how good Node js is  Considering how much I love working with jQuery and JavaScript in general  I can t help but wonder how to decide when to use Node js  The web application I have in mind is something like Bitly - takes some content  archives it    From all the homework I have been doing in the last few days  I obtained the following information  Node js    is a command-line tool that can be run as a regular web server and lets one run JavaScript programs utilizes the great V8 JavaScript engine is very good when you need to do several things at the same time is event-based so all the wonderful Ajax-like stuff can be done on the server side lets us share code between the browser and the backend lets us talk with MySQL   Some of the sources that I have come across are    Diving into Node js     Introduction and Installation Understanding NodeJS Node by Example  Archive is  Let   s Make a Web App  NodePad   Considering that Node js can be run almost out-of-the-box on Amazon s EC2 instances  I am trying to understand what type of problems require Node js as opposed to any of the mighty kings out there like PHP  Python and Ruby  I understand that it really depends on the expertise one has on a language  but my question falls more into the general category of  When to use a particular framework and what type of problems is it particularly suited for

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There is nothing like Silver Bullet  Everything comes with some cost associated with it  It is like if you eat oily food  you will compromise your health and healthy food does not come with spices like oily food  It is individual choice whether they want health or spices as in their food  Same way Node js consider to be used in specific scenario  If your app does not fit into that scenario you should not consider it for your app development  I am just putting my thought on the same   When to use Node JS   If your server side code requires very few cpu cycles  In other world you are doing non blocking operation and does not have heavy algorithm Job which consumes lots of CPU cycles  If you are from Javascript back ground and comfortable in writing Single Threaded code just like client side JS    When NOT to use Node JS   Your server request is dependent on heavy CPU consuming algorithm Job    Scalability Consideration with Node JS   Node JS itself does not utilize all core of underlying system and it is single threaded by default  you have to write logic by your own to utilize multi core processor and make it multi threaded    Node JS Alternatives  There are other option to use in place of Node JS however Vert x seems to be pretty promising and has lots of additional features like polygot and better scalability considerations

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My piece  nodejs is great for making real time systems like analytics  chat-apps  apis  ad servers  etc  Hell  I made my first chat app using nodejs and socket io under 2 hours and that too during exam  week   Edit  Its been several years since I have started using nodejs and I have used it in making many different things including static file servers  simple analytics  chat apps and much more  This is my take on when to use nodejs  When to use  When making system which put emphasis on concurrency and speed    Sockets only servers like chat apps  irc apps  etc  Social networks which put emphasis on realtime resources like geolocation  video stream  audio        stream  etc  Handling small chunks of data really fast like an analytics webapp  As exposing a REST only api    When not to use  Its a very versatile webserver so you can use it wherever you want but probably not these places    Simple blogs and static sites  Just as a static file server    Keep in mind that I am just nitpicking  For static file servers  apache is better mainly because it is widely available  The nodejs community has grown larger and more mature over the years and it is safe to say nodejs can be used just about everywhere if you have your own choice of hosting

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Node is great for quick prototypes but I d never use it again for anything complex  I spent 20 years developing a relationship with a compiler and I sure miss it   Node is especially painful for maintaining code that you haven t visited for awhile  Type info and compile time error detection are GOOD THINGS  Why throw all that out  For what  And dang  when something does go south the stack traces quite often completely useless

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I believe Node js is best suited for real-time applications  online games  collaboration tools  chat rooms  or anything where what one user  or robot   or sensor   does with the application needs to be seen by other users immediately  without a page refresh   I should also mention that Socket IO in combination with Node js will reduce your real-time latency even further than what is possible with long polling   Socket IO will fall back to long polling as a worst case scenario  and instead use web sockets or even Flash if they are available   But I should also mention that just about any situation where the code might block due to threads can be better addressed with Node js   Or any situation where you need the application to be event-driven   Also  Ryan Dahl said in a talk that I once attended that the Node js benchmarks closely rival Nginx for regular old HTTP requests   So if we build with Node js  we can serve our normal resources quite effectively  and when we need the event-driven stuff  it s ready to handle it   Plus it s all JavaScript all the time   Lingua Franca on the whole stack

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Reasons to use NodeJS    It runs Javascript  so you can use the same language on server and client  and even share some code between them  e g  for form validation  or to render views at either end   The single-threaded event-driven system is fast even when handling lots of requests at once  and also simple  compared to traditional multi-threaded Java or ROR frameworks  The ever-growing pool of packages accessible through NPM  including client and server-side libraries modules  as well as command-line tools for web development   Most of these are conveniently hosted on github  where sometimes you can report an issue and find it fixed within hours   It s nice to have everything under one roof  with standardized issue reporting and easy forking  It has become the defacto standard environment in which to run Javascript-related tools and other web-related tools  including task runners  minifiers  beautifiers  linters  preprocessors  bundlers and analytics processors  It seems quite suitable for prototyping  agile development and rapid product iteration    Reasons not to use NodeJS    It runs Javascript  which has no compile-time type checking   For large  complex safety-critical systems  or projects including collaboration between different organizations  a language which encourages contractual interfaces and provides static type checking may save you some debugging time  and explosions  in the long run    Although the JVM is stuck with null  so please use Haskell for your nuclear reactors   Added to that  many of the packages in NPM are a little raw  and still under rapid development   Some libraries for older frameworks have undergone a decade of testing and bugfixing  and are very stable by now  Npmjs org has no mechanism to rate packages  which has lead to a proliferation of packages doing more or less the same thing  out of which a large percentage are no longer maintained  Nested callback hell    Of course there are 20 different solutions to this     The ever-growing pool of packages can make one NodeJS project appear radically different from the next   There is a large diversity in implementations due to the huge number of options available  e g  Express Sails js Meteor Derby    This can sometimes make it harder for a new developer to jump in on a Node project   Contrast that with a Rails developer joining an existing project  he should be able to get familiar with the app pretty quickly  because all Rails apps are encouraged to use a similar structure  Dealing with files can be a bit of a pain  Things that are trivial in other languages  like reading a line from a text file  are weird enough to do with Node js that there s a StackOverflow question on that with 80  upvotes  There s no simple way to read one record at a time from a CSV file  Etc    I love NodeJS  it is fast and wild and fun  but I am concerned it has little interest in provable-correctness   Let s hope we can eventually merge the best of both worlds   I am eager to see what will replace Node in the future

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I have one real-world example where I have used Node js  The company where I work got one client who wanted to have a simple static HTML website  This website is for selling one item using PayPal and the client also wanted to have a counter which shows the amount of sold items  Client expected to have huge amount of visitors to this website  I decided to make the counter using Node js and the Express js framework   The Node js application was simple  Get the sold items amount from a Redis database  increase the counter when item is sold and serve the counter value to users via the API   Some reasons why I chose to use Node js in this case   It is very lightweight and fast  There has been over 200000 visits on this website in three weeks and minimal server resources has been able to handle it all  The counter is really easy to make to be real time  Node js was easy to configure  There are lots of modules available for free  For example  I found a Node js module for PayPal    In this case  Node js was an awesome choice

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If your application mainly tethers web apis  or other io channels  give or take a user interface  node js may be a fair pick for you  especially if you want to squeeze out the most scalability  or  if your main language in life is javascript  or javascript transpilers of sorts   If you build microservices  node js is also okay  Node js is also suitable for any project that is small or simple   Its main selling point is it allows front-enders take responsibility for back-end stuff rather than the typical divide  Another justifiable selling point is if your workforce is javascript oriented to begin with    Beyond a certain point however  you cannot scale your code without terrible hacks for forcing modularity  readability and flow control  Some people like those hacks though  especially coming from an event-driven javascript background  they seem familiar or forgivable    In particular  when your application needs to perform synchronous flows  you start bleeding over half-baked solutions that slow you down considerably in terms of your development process  If you have computation intensive parts in your application  tread with caution picking  only  node js  Maybe http   koajs com  or other novelties alleviate those originally thorny aspects  compared to when I originally used node js or wrote this

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One more thing node provides is the ability to create multiple v8 instanes of node using node s child process  childProcess fork   each requiring 10mb memory as per docs  on the fly  thus not affecting the main process running the server  So offloading a background job that requires huge server load becomes a child s play and we can easily kill them as and when needed   I ve been using node a lot and in most of the apps we build  require server connections at the same time thus a heavy network traffic  Frameworks like Express js and the new Koajs  which removed callback hell  have made working on node even more easier

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To make it short   Node js is well suited for applications that have a lot of concurrent connections and each request only needs very few CPU cycles  because the event loop  with all the other clients  is blocked during execution of a function   A good article about the event loop in Node js is Mixu s tech blog  Understanding the node js event loop

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It can be used where   Applications that are highly event driven  amp  are heavily I O bound Applications handling a large number of connections to other systems Real-time applications  Node js was designed from the ground up for real time and to be easy to use   Applications that juggle scads of information streaming to and from other sources High traffic  Scalable applications Mobile apps that have to talk to platform API  amp  database  without having to do a lot of data analytics Build out networked applications Applications that need to talk to the back end very often   On Mobile front  prime-time companies have relied on Node js for their mobile solutions  Check out why   LinkedIn is a prominent user  Their entire mobile stack is built on Node js  They went from running 15 servers with 15 instances on each physical machine  to just 4 instances     that can handle double the traffic   eBay launched ql io  a web query language for HTTP APIs  which uses Node js as the runtime stack  They were able to tune a regular developer-quality Ubuntu workstation to handle more than 120 000 active connections per node js process  with each connection consuming about 2kB memory   Walmart re-engineered its mobile app to use Node js and pushed its JavaScript processing to the server   Read more at  http   www pixelatingbits com a-closer-look-at-mobile-app-development-with-node-js

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Donning asbestos longjohns     Yesterday my title with Packt Publications  Reactive Programming with JavaScript  It isn t really a Node js-centric title  early chapters are intended to cover theory  and later code-heavy chapters cover practice  Because I didn t really think it would be appropriate to fail to give readers a webserver  Node js seemed by far the obvious choice  The case was closed before it was even opened   I could have given a very rosy view of my experience with Node js  Instead I was honest about good points and bad points I encountered   Let me include a few quotes that are relevant here      Warning  Node js and its ecosystem are hot--hot enough to burn you badly       When I was a teacher   s assistant in math  one of the non-obvious suggestions I was told was not to tell a student that something was    easy     The reason was somewhat obvious in retrospect  if you tell people something is easy  someone who doesn   t see a solution may end up feeling  even more  stupid  because not only do they not get how to solve the problem  but the problem they are too stupid to understand is an easy one       There are gotchas that don   t just annoy people coming from Python   Django  which immediately reloads the source if you change anything  With Node js  the default behavior is that if you make one change  the old version continues to be active until the end of time or until you manually stop and restart the server  This inappropriate behavior doesn   t just annoy Pythonistas  it also irritates native Node js users who provide various workarounds  The StackOverflow question    Auto-reload of files in Node js    has  at the time of this writing  over 200 upvotes and 19 answers  an edit directs the user to a nanny script  node-supervisor  with homepage at http   tinyurl com reactjs-node-supervisor  This problem affords new users with great opportunity to feel stupid because they thought they had fixed the problem  but the old  buggy behavior is completely unchanged  And it is easy to forget to bounce the server  I have done so multiple times  And the message I would like to give is     No  you   re not stupid because this behavior of Node js bit your back  it   s just that the designers of Node js saw no reason to provide appropriate behavior here  Do try to cope with it  perhaps taking a little help from node-supervisor or another solution  but please don   t walk away feeling that you   re stupid  You   re not the one with the problem  the problem is in Node js   s default behavior          This section  after some debate  was left in  precisely because I don t want to give an impression of    It   s easy     I cut my hands repeatedly while getting things to work  and I don   t want to smooth over difficulties and set you up to believe that getting Node js and its ecosystem to function well is a straightforward matter and if it   s not straightforward for you too  you don   t know what you   re doing  If you don   t run into obnoxious difficulties using Node js  that   s wonderful  If you do  I would hope that you don   t walk away feeling     I   m stupid   there must be something wrong with me     You   re not stupid if you experience nasty surprises dealing with Node js  It   s not you  It   s Node js and its ecosystem    The Appendix  which I did not really want after the rising crescendo in the last chapters and the conclusion  talks about what I was able to find in the ecosystem  and provided a workaround for moronic literalism      Another database that seemed like a perfect fit  and may yet be redeemable  is a server-side implementation of the HTML5 key-value store  This approach has the cardinal advantage of an API that most good front-end developers understand well enough  For that matter  it   s also an API that most not-so-good front-end developers understand well enough  But with the node-localstorage package  while dictionary-syntax access is not offered  you want to use localStorage setItem key  value  or localStorage getItem key   not localStorage key    the full localStorage semantics are implemented  including a default 5MB quota   WHY  Do server-side JavaScript developers need to be protected from themselves       For client-side database capabilities  a 5MB quota per website is really a generous and useful amount of breathing room to let developers work with it  You could set a much lower quota and still offer developers an immeasurable improvement over limping along with cookie management  A 5MB limit doesn   t lend itself very quickly to Big Data client-side processing  but there is a really quite generous allowance that resourceful developers can use to do a lot  But on the other hand  5MB is not a particularly large portion of most disks purchased any time recently  meaning that if you and a website disagree about what is reasonable use of disk space  or some site is simply hoggish  it does not really cost you much and you are in no danger of a swamped hard drive unless your hard drive was already too full  Maybe we would be better off if the balance were a little less or a little more  but overall it   s a decent solution to address the intrinsic tension for a client-side context       However  it might gently be pointed out that when you are the one writing code for your server  you don   t need any additional protection from making your database more than a tolerable 5MB in size  Most developers will neither need nor want tools acting as a nanny and protecting them from storing more than 5MB of server-side data  And the 5MB quota that is a golden balancing act on the client-side is rather a bit silly on a Node js server   And  for a database for multiple users such as is covered in this Appendix  it might be pointed out  slightly painfully  that that   s not 5MB per user account unless you create a separate database on disk for each user account  that   s 5MB shared between all user accounts together  That could get painful if you go viral   The documentation states that the quota is customizable  but an email a week ago to the developer asking how to change the quota is unanswered  as was the StackOverflow question asking the same  The only answer I have been able to find is in the Github CoffeeScript source  where it is listed as an optional second integer argument to a constructor  So that   s easy enough  and you could specify a quota equal to a disk or partition size  But besides porting a feature that does not make sense  the tool   s author has failed completely to follow a very standard convention of interpreting 0 as meaning    unlimited    for a variable or function where an integer is to specify a maximum limit for some resource use  The best thing to do with this misfeature is probably to specify that the quota is Infinity    if  typeof localStorage      undefined     localStorage     null              var LocalStorage   require  node-localstorage   LocalStorage    localStorage   new LocalStorage   dirname     localStorage       Infinity         Swapping two comments in order      People needlessly shot themselves in the foot constantly using JavaScript as a whole  and part of JavaScript being made respectable language was a Douglas Crockford saying in essence     JavaScript as a language has some really good parts and some really bad parts  Here are the good parts  Just forget that anything else is there     Perhaps the hot Node js ecosystem will grow its own    Douglas Crockford     who will say     The Node js ecosystem is a coding Wild West  but there are some real gems to be found  Here   s a roadmap  Here are the areas to avoid at almost any cost  Here are the areas with some of the richest paydirt to be found in ANY language or environment          Perhaps someone else can take those words as a challenge  and follow Crockford   s lead and write up    the good parts    and   or    the better parts    for Node js and its ecosystem  I   d buy a copy       And given the degree of enthusiasm and sheer work-hours on all projects  it may be warranted in a year  or two  or three  to sharply temper any remarks about an immature ecosystem made at the time of this writing  It really may make sense in five years to say     The 2015 Node js ecosystem had several minefields  The 2020 Node js ecosystem has multiple paradises

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The most important reasons to start your next project using Node       All the coolest dudes are into it     so it must be fun  You can hangout at the cooler and have lots of Node adventures to brag about  You re a penny pincher when it comes to cloud hosting costs  Been there done that with Rails You hate IIS deployments Your old IT job is getting rather dull and you wish you were in a shiny new Start Up    What to expect       You ll feel safe and secure with Express without all the server bloatware you never needed  Runs like a rocket and scales well  You dream it  You installed it  The node package repo npmjs org is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world  Your brain will get time warped in the land of nested callbacks         until you learn to keep your Promises  Sequelize and Passport are your new API friends  Debugging mostly async code will get umm     interesting   Time for all Noders to master Typescript    Who uses it    PayPal  Netflix  Walmart  LinkedIn  Groupon  Uber  GoDaddy  Dow Jones Here s why they switched to Node

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You did a great job of summarizing what s awesome about Node js  My feeling is that Node js is especially suited for applications where you d like to maintain a persistent connection from the browser back to the server  Using a technique known as  long-polling   you can write an application that sends updates to the user in real time  Doing long polling on many of the web s giants  like Ruby on Rails or Django  would create immense load on the server  because each active client eats up one server process  This situation amounts to a tarpit attack  When you use something like Node js  the server has no need of maintaining separate threads for each open connection     This means you can create a browser-based chat application in Node js that takes almost no system resources to serve a great many clients  Any time you want to do this sort of long-polling  Node js is a great option     It s worth mentioning that Ruby and Python both have tools to do this sort of thing  eventmachine and twisted  respectively   but that Node js does it exceptionally well  and from the ground up  JavaScript is exceptionally well situated to a callback-based concurrency model  and it excels here  Also  being able to serialize and deserialize with JSON native to both the client and the server is pretty nifty    I look forward to reading other answers here  this is a fantastic question    It s worth pointing out that Node js is also great for situations in which you ll be reusing a lot of code across the client server gap  The Meteor framework makes this really easy  and a lot of folks are suggesting this might be the future of web development  I can say from experience that it s a whole lot of fun to write code in Meteor  and a big part of this is spending less time thinking about how you re going to restructure your data  so the code that runs in the browser can easily manipulate it and pass it back    Here s an article on Pyramid and long-polling  which turns out to be very easy to set up with a little help from gevent  TicTacToe and Long Polling with Pyramid

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I can share few points where amp why to use node js    For realtime applications like chat collaborative editing better we go with nodejs as it is event base where fire event and data to clients from server   Simple and easy to understand as it is javascript base where most of people have idea  Most of current web applications going towards  angular js amp backbone  with node it is easy to interact with client side code as both will use json data   Lot of plugins available    Drawbacks -   Node will support most of databases but best is mongodb which won t support complex joins and others  Compilation Errors   developer should handle each and every exceptions other wise if any error accord application will stop working  where again we need to go and start it manually or using  any automation tool     Conclusion -  Nodejs best to use for simple and real time applications  if you have very big business logic and complex functionality better should not use nodejs  If you want to build an application along with chat and any collaborative functionality   node can be used in specific parts and remain should go with your convenience technology

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Another great thing that I think no one has mentioned about Node js is the amazing community  the package management system  npm  and the amount of modules that exist that you can include by simply including them in your package json file

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Node best for concurrent request handling -  So  Let   s start with a story  From last 2 years I am working on JavaScript and developing web front end and I am enjoying it  Back end guys provide   s us some API   s written in Java python  we don   t care  and we simply write a AJAX call  get our data and guess what   we are done  But in real it is not that easy  If data we are getting is not correct or there is some server error then we stuck and we have to contact our back end guys over the mail or chat sometimes on whatsApp too      This is not cool  What if we wrote our API   s in JavaScript and call those API   s from our front end   Yes that   s pretty cool because if we face any problem in API we can look into it  Guess what   you can do this now   How       Node is there for you   Ok agreed that you can write your API in JavaScript but what if I am ok with above problem  Do you have any other reason to use node for rest API    so here is the magic begins  Yes I do have other reasons to use node for our API   s   Let   s go back to our traditional rest API system which is based on either blocking operation or threading  Suppose two concurrent request occurs  r1 and r2    each of them require database operation  So In traditional system what will happens    1  Waiting Way   Our server starts serving r1 request and waits for query response  after completion of r1   server starts to serve r2 and does it in same way  So waiting is not a good idea because we don   t have that much time   2  Threading Way   Our server will creates two threads for both requests r1 and r2 and serve their purpose after querying database so cool its fast But it is memory consuming because you can see we started two threads also problem increases when both request is querying same data then you have to deal with deadlock kind of issues   So its better than waiting way but still issues are there   Now here is   how node will do it   3  Nodeway   When same concurrent request comes in node then it will register an event with its callback and move ahead it will not wait for query response for a particular request So when r1 request comes then node   s event loop  yes there is an event loop in node which serves this purpose   register an event with its callback function and move ahead for serving r2 request and similarly register its event with its callback  Whenever any query finishes it triggers its corresponding event and execute its callback  to completion without being interrupted   So no waiting  no threading   no memory consumption     yes this is nodeway for serving rest API

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My one more reason to choose Node js for a new project is    Be able to do pure cloud based development  I have used Cloud9 IDE for a while and now I can t imagine without it  it covers all the development lifecycles  All you need is a browser and you can code anytime anywhere on any devices  You don t need to check in code in one Computer like at home   then checkout in another computer like at work place     Of course  there maybe cloud based IDE for other languages or platforms  Cloud 9 IDE is adding supports for other languages as well   but using Cloud 9 to do Node js developement is really a great experience for me

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