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

"an eternity in the world of coding"

[Anonymous Coward]

Code lasts a surprising amount of time compared to the mindset of the mainstream programmer. You know, the payroll stuff running on mainframes, embedded stuff running everywhere, that sort of thing. The short timespans we see on the "consumer" side, moreso on "web" and "apps" and "cloud" and other buzzwords. In fact, html5 is all about moving on from previously working stuff and "upgrading" to the latest fad. That's why it's branded a "living standard".

Anyhow, php and mysql are rotten pieces of crap and so is wordpress, of necessity since it's built on top of crap. node.js has the same problem. So you can stuff your wildly inefficient stack "in the cloud" so you can throw resources at your room-heater software with "web-scale" wild abandon. "Oh yeah, future proofing, baby!" Well, no.

Me, I make sure most of the html is of the old-and-working, not the "living (only in the latest nightly browsers)" kind, meaning I still stick to mostly html4 and css, and generate both on the pre-deployment server. Meaning most content is served statically, and can be pre-compressed. That scales wonderfully. The little dynamic stuff what's left after that, eh, we can deal with it. This is very old school, but I've yet to see the whippersnappers on the web-lawn manage to do better by throwing more code and more stack layers, even more stacks, requiring more resources, at the problem. It really doesn't matter what flavour they pick, as they keep on picking the suckiest, ickiest flavours. Like, oh, php, mysql, and node.js. Migrate from shit to crap? Maybe the other steaming heap of manure will stink less? Geeze, I don't know. Why don't you try and find out? I'm sure it'll be a worthwhile experience! Don't forget your complimentary family-sized bottle of turd polish.

Short answer: dont

[MyDixieWrecked]

A lot of people are spewing a lot of well-founded hate at the node platform, but the comments are missing a lot of substance.

Node is just ok. What it is amazing at is doing lots of asynchronous IO, and has some libraries that make this pretty easy (i.e.: async). When all you need to do is read files and hit APIs and write files it's great.

Now node has a lot of shortcomings. For one, it's really not that fast when doing actual processing. If you need to do any kind of remotely complex calculations, including things like html template rendering (handlebars), data structure transformations or even like zipping/unzipping, it's slow as a dog. And since data calculations aren't IO, async operations actually start to slow you down. AND, unless you explicitly do things in an async manner, your whole node process will lock up and only that one task will execute, which can cause all kinds of latency issues with your app.

One can argue that ruby, etc suffer from the same fate and that's why you have multiple processes running. But because of node's async nature, if you are using a web framework like express, each process will potentially be handling multiple clients. And process that's processing will cause those clients to get slower responses and any crash will kill all of those clients.

There is also the mess that is npm, where it becomes very easy to have a 700MB dependency directory which SUCKS to deploy to multiple servers.

That's just my experience as a node Dev for the past 18 months.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Ruby Community / Rails is hardly "a mess"

[KermodeBear]

I've had to learn some Ruby to support automated testing written in Ruby and Cucumber.

I hate Ruby.

Ruby feels like someone took Perl and intentionally made it even worse.

The syntax is awful. Pipes and hashes and at symbols everywhere. The documentation is not good. Many packages - I'm sorry, "gems," because we have to be cutesy - don't have documentation at all, not even in the source code. Typing? What's typing? Everything is an object! That's all the type you need, right? Curly braces? Pffft. Those are to passe. You need to close things with an 'end'. Methods with ? in the name? Sure, why not. It gets really fun when you're using that character as a method name and an operator.

I can forgive the anti-curly-brace thing, but everything else about the language feels like it was developed by an 8 year old watching bad hacker movies. So much language-specific crap that does utterly nothing to enhance readability or ease of development.

The day I never have to touch Ruby again will be a great day.

Re:Works fine

[Anonymous Coward]

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860)

I can second that it works fine. I'll go further to say it doesn't just work well, it works!!! Sadly though, it does take a better programmer to excel in JS/NodeJS.

1) Yes, it's asynchronous and takes some getting used to. But so are real CPUs, or perhaps you didn't notice because of all the language abstraction.

2) Yes, it's loosely typed. But try passing an actual function as a parameter in a strongly typed language. Or get a function back as a return value. Better yet, get back a runtime specialized function as a return value.

3) Yes, it's single threaded. And what a God Send that is. You can have the net effect of threading libraries with thread/variable synchronization without any of the overhead. (If you learn how to program in an async environment. Which seems to be hard for some people.)

4) Yes, NodeJS uses callbacks. So learn Promises. You avoid callback hell and get extra cool features, like queueing Promises. (Oh, right. Promises are hard.) :-)

5) Forget about OO polymorphism. JS take polymorphism to a level that Java/PHP can't even dream about. What you need Java Aspects for is natively baked into JS. And it did that on day one, not seven generations later or with an addon. JS is a natural at Aspect Programming (as well as Functional Programming.) Which makes life simple to go from prototype to fully featured. Especially when you find out about "features" the week before deployment. (Hint: it's this feature that make integration testing easy.)

6) NodeJS along with PM2, gives you the advantages of Docker Containers without the complexity or overheard or wasted disk space (or the need for tooling.) And it doesn't have to run in privledged mode. Which is only important if you think security is important. :-) You can break down your API into single endpoints (or groups of endponts) and run them seperately in their own execution context. Change, replace, update, deploy services without downtime or affecting other services on the same NodeJS instance. THIS IS Micro Services!

7) NodeJS's module system let's you run several versions of the same package but only in the dependency tree where they're needed. Think of running several Java6 libraries in the same JVM execution context as several Java8 libraries, at the same time, with no possible conflicts. Blow your mind yet?

I could go on, but that's not the point I'm trying to make.

First they laughed that JS was a "toy" language. Now they're opposing it as a new platform. So when will it be seen as self-evident?

Slashdot quality has improved in leaps and bounds

[Qbertino]

David has shortened my Ask Slashdot significantly (no hurt feelings here what-so-ever), but the effort he put into his edited post is heart-warming and his preservation of the gist of my Node.js issue is spot on.

I've noticed that the quality of the editing work done on Slashdot ever since the newest crew took over is off the charts compared to everything before and I'd like to take the occasion to give a huge warm applause to the new crew and the work these guys are doing. You folks freakin' rock and I've never felt such pride in being a long-time slashdotter as I feel right now. I wish you a nice stream of revenue and happy times as the new herald of slashdot, you guys are off to a spectacular start in my book. BRAVO!

I'm actually going to point out to my geek buddies who've since abandoned slashdot (Whimps! :-) ) that now if ever is the time to return. Simply seeing slashdot soar to new heights is a pleasure in itself.

As for the discussion on my question - great input, folks.
And, btw., needs to be said after 17 years of slashdotting: You guys rock too. Of course. Naturally.

Javascript is going away

[phantomfive]

Javascript is approaching its peak as a programming language. The thing that will kill it is WebAssembly.

Soon, you will be able to write front-end code in any language you like, you won't need to use Javascript. And if you're not using Javascript on the front-end, there's really no reason to use it on the back end.

Re:Yes callback hell is a thing

[Jeremy Lee]

As pointed out, Promises are the primary solution to Node's "callback hell". People like to hate on the explicit value/error return separation, but that's merely a convention used by the top-level HTTP components, not actually baked into the language. It makes something explicit that is usually implicit.

The thing is, if you language has Exceptions and try/catch then you already have an implicit equivalent of the success/fail control split, and anyone trying to properly handle exceptions caused by their exceptions finds themselves merely in the circle of hell next door.

I've coded in node.js for a couple of years now, written some semi-big pieces of software to do real-time message passing/transaction processing stuff. It was fine. It's better than PHP, which I moved from. It's better than writing cgi-bin programs in C++, which is how I started. On of the big reasons to use node.js is it nicely integrates alternative protocols like WebSockets, RTC, AMPQ, so you can roll up a "web server plus other protocol" system that gets a lot of jobs done you just can't accomplish with PHP/Apache.

People love to hate on Javascript because they don't like admitting the language wars are over, and Javascript won. When you can walk into a room and ask "How many people have a compiler on them _right now_." and people answer "I've got at least two!" Try that with any other language. Compilers shipped, lines written, active users... JS wins on all metrics. It's not the "best" language, but then, what is?

A last note... node.js works especially well in 'cluster' situations, because to be honest, your average node.js process isn't terribly reliable. Individual node.js programs will crash on a weekly basis, thanks to funny net errors. In a cluster that doesn't matter, and in fact you WANT your 'nodes' to fail-fast rather than hang waiting for a deadlock. 'forever' restarts the errant script in seconds, but in those seconds your load-balancer should be handing the task off to another node. It's a paradox that to get a reliable cluster, you want your individual parts to be quite twitchy and explody., which node.js is.

Re:Yes callback hell is a thing

[Jeremy Lee]

Because when you need to get the page built and back to the user in 10ms, you control path through the program must be explicit and direct, both for the normal control flow, and the error path

And because the alternative to single-threading is multi-threading, and that sounds like a great abstraction until you realize how much time is lost acquiring and releasing locks, and performing context switches. And you see your code complexity balloon because you have to deal with all the cross-thread synchronization. And it's hard to test.

The alternative to single-threading is a system which can interrupt the current page build with the _next_ page build (multithreading!) and that almost always makes things worse.

Node.js responds to server overload by rejecting page requests because it's busy - something the outer load balancer can deal with in milliseconds. (You have a load balancer, right?) Multithreaded programs respond to overloads by slowing down, running out of stack space and crashing. If you're running a real-world web app with thousands of users, one of those is worse.

Re:Yes callback hell is a thing

[erikkemperman]

It's a paradox that to get a reliable cluster, you want your individual parts to be quite twitchy and explody., which node.js is.

I think I get what you're saying, but somehow I don't expect this argument to convert any nonbelievers :-)

My personal favourite JS verdict is from Verity Stob, over at The Register,

CON: The most dysfunctional functional language. On top of all its well-known flaws that disrupt ordinary primitive programming, it lacks many allegedly must-have functional gewgaws. Its variables are mutable, its type holes are indubitable, its 'eagerness' unsuitable, its modules are inscrutable, tail recursion disputable, scoping inexcusable, and I'll stop there, with 'refutable' (to name but one) still in the bank, just because you were kind enough to beg me.

PRO: It's what you'll end up using.

Source: Learn you Func Prog on five minute quick!