Comment by edwinnathaniel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edwinnathaniel | Hacker News Reader

There does not seem a day to go by without a NodeJS-based framework/library get the heat from the community ever since December 2015.

It appears that 2016 is the year when the hype from NodeJS died down and vendors/OSS-community must now deal with the hard, un-glamorous, work to clean up, maintain, prepare roadmap, and so on. Which is good!

Or it could also be the year where people realized that the use-case for NodeJS is fairly very very specific/niche (unless if they love JS so much that they're willing to absorb the pain using NodeJS + its ecosystem).

SailJS vs TrailJS, ExpressJS is dying, NodeJS vs io.js, StrongLoop+IBM fiasco (and SL reputation), now MeteorJS!. I had high hopes that MeteorJS can be one of the premier NodeJS frameworks (Rod Johnson, who created Spring Framework, invested in the company. I hope they listen to him...).

I love to see competition in NodeJS ecosystem and hopefully sooner than later, a few solid options emerged because right now, everything is not a good option except barebone NodeJS and roll-your-own-framework.

> Or it could also be the year where people realized that the use-case for NodeJS is fairly very very specific/niche (unless if they love JS so much that they're willing to absorb the pain using NodeJS + its ecosystem).

I disagree with this point... I think Node is very versatile and solid. I dont see anything niche about it. It does very few basic jobs well, 1) providing a good package system (NPM) and 2) giving us javascript on the backend. I feel like people think that just because Node is associated with Javascript that its inherently bad.

I see BigCo who uses NodeJS only use it for their front-end appserver that farms the actual work to microservices _that are not written in NodeJS_ behind the scene.

I've had a conversation with someone where I asked "how do you deal with Money in NodeJS" where the response was to farm it out to a services written in either C# or Java. No Money processing is done in JS (maybe because JS lack BigDecimal? or no standard Money library that deals with ISO-level currency?).

LinkedIN used NodeJS for their mobile app back-end if I recalled. I would assume that NodeJS is just a front-end appserver talking to myriad back-end microservices written in other languages.

So this is where I stand given the lack of good stable solid libraries provided by NodeJS: its place is just sitting as a gateway front-end appserver that pass processed request to a bunch of services in the back-end and get response back from those services, do minimum massaging, and spits JSON back to the front-end. This is why I kind of labelled NodeJS as a niche. Sure, Trello uses NodeJS all the way left and right but I suppose you can write web-app back-end using Go or C++ too. Painful but works.

My faith in JS for back-end is definitely pretty low given that working with either callback or promise isn't fun but that's personal preference more than anything else.

Anyhow... I'd love to see real production level NodeJS code that deals with complex business logic (as opposed to super-high-level presentations without insight to the actual code) before I feel comfortable choosing NodeJS in general.

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