Woohooo! Node.js!

This is odd, I have not been so excited about learning a new technology, than node.js. I really tried many things, Lisp, Python, Ruby, openAL, openGL, Ruby on Rails, aspect oriented programming, Django, Flask, Drupal, HTML5, pure C and many more, but all where at best a "hmm, interesting". In most cases I was looking for a tool for a task and picked up the things that people where talking about.

If you forage in the archive of this journal you will see that C++ is my language of choice and there are very few other languages that I consider useful. My rationale is that, C++ is a powerful and strong language and any other language must offer a significant gain in functionality to warrant the penalty of a virtual machine or runtime safety checks.

Why is node.js so awesome?!

At first node is hard to wrap your head around. It sounds feeble with Java Script as the core technology. But since I know that Java Script is the most misunderstood language in the world and I seriously worked on integrating Spider Monkey into some of my (failed) game engine projects.

What really is revolutionary is the way that almost everything is handled asynchronously. The obvious ones, such as waiting on I/O, are handled this way, but also other aspects, such as a HTTP server handling function. What makes this revolutionary is the way in which Java Scripts closures make it totally pain less and readable to implement.

This leads to the weird fact, that node is single threaded but many logical threads do things. Not only does it results in a very efficient use of CPU time, but it also makes programming really simple. No need for locking primitives, you only have one thread.

What is also interesting is that node solves many scalability issues. If you can distribute tasks between multiple instances of node, putting these instances on multiple serves becomes trivial.

What is also nice is the large and open NPM repository and NPM in general. This is not such a big deal and I con not tell you why I think NPM is great and Python's PIP evokes only "meh". But one of the killer features is that, by default NPM installs the dependencies locally, based on your package.json file. This makes node applications extremely portable, since no globally installed dependencies are required, save node itself.

Try node.js, it is great. But take this advice with a grain of salt, as always.