My Initial Musings on Node.js
Due to all of the buzz around Node.js lately I thought that I would take it for a test drive. I tend to be very skeptical about frameworks with such hype around them as they tend to just be a passing fad that can not really be used in production environments.
What really got my attention was the fact that you use javascript to write node applications. This to me really opens up server side development to a much wider audience, an audience that tends to understand what happens in the browser very well. This in my opinion can be a great thing. I think we will see some very interesting applications appearing in the future and the amount of available modules for common tasks seems to be growing at a good rate.
I have been looking specifically at node's support for developing REST API's using express. Developing a REST server is very straight forward using express. The fact that applications are written using Javascript a JSON payload is very simple and natural to work with but since Node is basically designed around building highly scalable network applications there are loads of other cool things that you could do with it.
With the popularity of mobile applications these days, which often need to chat back to a server, I think that node could be very well placed to develop standards based, highly scalable backends very quickly to complement your mobile app. If this is something that interests you I would recommend that you head over to Node Tuts for a peek at some of the great videos there.
