Sorry for the spelling mistake. I meant there and not their.
This can happen, when English is your third language (grown up in Afghanistan, living in Germany) and you don't use English every day.
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Plurk used Node for 8 months in production environment and they seemed overall pleased with the project. They also did their project on Node 0.1.33 and we are now at v. 0.4.8 so I'm sure while this post serves as a fair warning that it might not be perfect for any project, Node is still very good.
At Typewire we too started on Node and moved to Java (using Netty for NIO). I really truly love JS and wanted it to work, but the throughput on Node for open connections just wasn't where we needed it to be.
The best use case I can come up with is using node, socket.io, and knockout to quickly build a shared-state application (so long as there is a way to reconcile communication latency, which is why a declarative library like knockout is a good thing). I'm trying to come up with a good problem to solve with that tech stack for this year's Node Knockout.
In short, I agree, Node lends itself nicely to a particular subset of problems, but a lot of the places where it is presumed to shine (speed/real-time/code reuse) others are moving in to follow its lead.
I don't know if it's deployed yet but Jason Roberts of techzing (Great Podcast btw, here: http://techzinglive.com/ ) has been talking about a node.js rewrite of the backend for car hire service Uber (http://www.uber.com/)
(ASIDE) Really appreciate the heads up on techzing -- been looking for a podcast to add to Java Posse and Mixergy for over a year and never been happy with Podcast discovery in iTunes. Just added TechZ and can't stop hitting "GET" reading through all the past episodes.
I remember there was HN item about this when it came out, but tl;dr of the article that I got was, some people want to use Node.js but performance + stability is what FaceBook wants, and something that isn't prevalent in Node (yet?)
I wait for the day when NodeJS breaks backward compatability
It would be foolhardy to answer your question, as someone would inevitably respond with another language that can do it.
I will say that NodeJS has inspired me to get off my ass and code a basic CRUD site, which could get me started and lead to more interesting features. Sure, could have used Python or anything else, but this is how it's going for now. I choose to drink this particular Kool-Aid for now.
is there anything only one language can do? I believe both answers is a no. I think we should be asking 'is there something that is best done with node'
Sure, alright, but that's supposed to mean faster servers and a smaller footprint, and since one or two people here mentioned that Node doesn't really live up to that, my question is: What does Node offer me in terms of speed and footprint that, say, nginx doesn't?
... which are used to build web pages sent through a synchronous, request-response protocol that is HTTP. I understand asynchronous events are used in GUI design, where you have actual asynchronous sources (e.g. mouse), but what are the benefits for a web page?
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Thanks also for your replies.