[simonw]

We have some Node.js code (not yet in production) for http://lanyrd.com/ for interacting with the Twitter streaming API.

My personal philosophy with Node.js is to use it for small, standalone network servers that complement the rest of my stack - basically anything that needs to handle large amounts of I/O. Everything I've written with Node.js so far has been just a few hundred lines of code.

So for templating, database interaction and so on I'll keep using Django. I'll use Node for stuff like comet/WebSocket pubsub services, handling file uploads, rate limiting API proxies, webhook dispatching, interacting with slow or streaming external web APIs, etc.

GitHub are using Node in this way at the moment: https://github.com/blog/678-meet-nodeload-the-new-download-s...

[andrewcamel]

Why is it good to use for large amounts of I/O? I'm in the process of making a twitter-based app and I'm debating whether or not I should be using Python / Django.