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Comment by synergy20 | Hacker News Reader

I have always been wondering how Node.js will do as a backend option. I feel it's in decline, a quick google trend confirms it: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

I invested quite some time on node.js and eventually bailed out and now am using other alternatives. It did not work out as not all applications need those async-logics which made code unnecessarily difficult.

Nowadays for me, nodejs along with npm/yarn are just more of a frontend tool, which are still very useful and essential.

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With serverless functions being the hype, along with things like Next.js, Node isn't going away as a popular "backend for frontend" technology.

What does serverless functions mean?

Is it a good idea to make hype a relevant factor in choosing web or app's architecture?

> Is it a good idea to make hype a relevant factor in choosing web or app's architecture?

Yes! Hype = active community and support, interested developers, possibly novel solutions to problems, etc...

It can just as easily mean that nobody knows the solution to its novel problems yet. It potentially means nobody wants to touch it in a few years once the largest problems have revealed themselves en masse.

If something has hype it's worth investigating, absolutely. But it should also be treated with a great deal of scepticism; there's often a lot of money in it for businesses and individuals moving you onto the latest shiny tech.

It's probably best to look at the trends of other platforms/languages, alongside of Node.js. Many languages showed a similar, slight decline, which might indicate something else is going on: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

I think node is great for stateless micro services. I know many people here have a vendetta against micro service architecture, but it has worked wonderfully for me in my career. Development is fast and I can keep cloud bills down with autoscaling.

Are you meaning to refer to JavaScript rather than Node.js? I don't know of a way to use the Node.js runtime inside of a browser (the frontend), my feeling is that's pretty redundant.

I took the comment to mean it's only useful for something like npm/webpack (dependency management and hot loading), which I strongly disagree with.

I think they mean using Node.js tools like yarn/NPM for compilers, linters, etc, as opposed to using it for a server.

yes it is, it's still essential for frontend devel, actually it's pretty much a must-have scenario.

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