Ask Slashdot: Have You Migrated To Node.js?

A developer maintaining his company's "half-assed LAMP / WordPress stack pipeline for web and web application development" is considering something more scalable that could eventually be migrated into the cloud. Qbertino asks Slashdot: Have you moved from LAMP (PHP) to Node.js for custom product development and if so, what's your advice? What downsides of JS on the server and in Node.js have a real-world effect? Is callback hell really a thing? And what is the state of free and open-source Node products...? Is there any trend inside the Node.js camp on building a platform and CMS product that competes with the PHP camp whilst maintaining a sane architecture, or is it all just a ball of hype with a huge mess of its own growing in the background, Rails-style?
Condensing Qbertino's original submission: he wants to be able to quickly deliver "pretty, working, and half-way reliable products that make us money" -- and to build a durable pipeline. So leave your educated opinions in the comments. What did you experience moving to Node.js?

Comments

Have you migrated to qbasic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck no, it's a toy language that's being stretched way beyond its intent. JS has become the absolute bane of the internet, which now requires 2ghz machines to render ~~responsive~~ web pages, and the language has no place whatsoever on servers.

The real question

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

The real question is why, and what would be gained from doing so?

This would be a major project, is the return really going to be worth the investment of time and energy?

I think there is often a desire, rational or not, among programmers to want to redo things and make them "clean" (whatever that means) and more efficient. It's a laudable notion, but it's often outweighed by the amount of work required to re-code everything from scratch. I've rarely found it to be worth the time and effort, frankly.

My guess is that he'd be better off optimizing some of the choke points, or perhaps implementing one of the many existing development platforms. That may require some modification, but it would still probably be a better way to go about it. It's unlikely that his needs are so out-of-band or unusual that a standardized solution wouldn't work (again, even if it required some customization).

Wanting "Something potentially scalable and perhaps even ready for zero-fuss migration to an entirely cloud-based platform" sounds very buzz-wordy to me, and that's a red flag in my book.

Finally, the statement that "it's about correctly building a pipeline that won't be completely outdated in 10 years" seems to be pure wishful thinking.

Good luck with that- I doubt ANY development environment is going to survive for ten years. That's an eternity in the world of coding and development. Tools get outdated as capabilities and needs expand and mature. Hell, I doubt I'll even be using the same text editor in 10 years, let alone an entire development environment.

There are two kinds of people

[RightwingNutjob]

1. Those who use real programming languages.
2. Those who are surprised when their shit breaks because someone on the other side of the internet sneezed.