[programminggeek]

If you really like evented programming, use node. Everything there is evented. I tried EventMachine and it just felt worse than node, documentation is worse, libraries are worse, it just wasn't a whole lot of fun.

I haven't tried celluloid yet, but I've learned one lesson building things with PHP, Ruby, Python, Node, Java, Scala, etc. That lesson is to use tools with a community of people around it that are using those tools to solve the same problems as you. The more community is around a project the more likely that someone else has stumbled upon whatever bug or problem you have hit already and found a solution if it exists. Also, documentation tends to be better and easier to find on more popular languages and frameworks.

So, if you like busting out CRUD web apps, you probably should look at PHP and Zend/Symfony/etc. framework or Ruby on Rails or Python Django or Java Play. If you like doing single page JS apps you should look at Knockout, Backbone, and Ember. If you want to do more evented/parallel networked apps you should look at node, scala, clojure, go, and erlang because those communities care a lot about threading, evented, actor pattern type programming.

Evented/multicore/multithreaded programming is just not something that say PHP, Ruby, and Python have embraced as much as a community because it's not for the most part a problem that the average PHP, Ruby, and Python dev is trying to solve most of the time.

[tptacek]

Python programmers have been doing evented code for almost a decade using Twisted. EventMachine happened later, but then, so did the mainstreaming of Ruby. You realize, don't you, that Tcl has all three of Javascript, Ruby, and Python beat when it comes to evented I/O?

Node does not own evented I/O.

[programminggeek]

I agree that Node doe not own evented I/O, my point was more that if you care about concurrency, parallelism, evented io, you should work in communities that care about those things and build tools around them. Ruby as a community cares more about Rails than evented I/O. Node is purely evented I/O, so that's basically ALL they care about. I guess Python is probably more in between.

I didn't mean to say node owns evented I/O, just that their whole community embraces it.

[bad_user]

Well actually, the JVM is probably the most potent platform when it comes to async I/O, not only because the standard nio library and the high-level wrappers, like Netty and Mina, are very mature, but also because you can compose blocking and non-blocking pieces of functionality like you cannot do with Node / V8.

Checkout Akka, it's awesome: http://akka.io/

[jeremyjh]

There are very few libraries.

[debacle]

Are you trying to say that there are very few libraries for something that runs on the JVM?

[jeremyjh]

There are few async libraries.

[bad_user]

That hasn't been my experience.

[draegtun]

For event programming I use AnyEvent (Perl) the so called DBI of event loop programming.

It's well documented, straightforward to use, robust and works seamlessly on top of many event loops (libev, libevent, Glib, Tk and more).

And I just need to look at AnyEvent::* namespace on CPAN to see what can be run with it - http://search.cpan.org/search?query=anyevent%3A%3A*&mode... (currently lists 630 modules)