Thoughts on NodeJS

I have read several articles lately about why you shouldn’t use NodeJS and all that. This might be relevant for business building their product on a language they don’t want to help work on themselves.

If you’re going to adopt a language like nodejs as your primary platform, you have to be willing to work through the bugs, help improve libraries as the language evolves, and maybe even contribute to the language itself.

LearnBoost is one company that I have seen making incredible contributions to the NodeJS community. They’ve developed the popular websocket library Socket.IO which I have been using lately. It was incredibly simple to setup, and voila! I have support for realtime communication from server to browser over WebSockets, Flash sockets, and 4 other fallback methods.

Companies like this will be the ones that push a language into stability and the mainstream. You might consider NodeJS to be in the same situation Rails was in the beginning. It’s a long ways to go, but if you are one of the early contributors building libraries and making a more robust language, you can gain some serious following and popularity.

I’m working on a web socket based IRC client in the browser. While I don’t have any knowledge of the internals of Node nor Socket.IO, I’m not scared about diving in and learning some things. It might take me a while to get situated, but I’m willing to start at the bottom and work my way up.

Sure working on a new language like Node can be daunting, but being so new, there is incredible excitement around it. There is also lots of criticism, but what language doesn’t have the same? Enough talk, it’s time to act.