Who is Using Node.js And Why? Yammer, Bocoup, Proxlet and Yahoo
bostinnovation.com
bostinnovation.com
It is unfortunate that the "director of platform at Yammer" does not understand what Ruby is. Ruby is a programming language and Node.js is a system written in Javascript. It is useless to compare Node.js to Ruby. There is a similar system to Node.js in Ruby, it's called Event Machine. The official Node.js about page states "Node is similar in design to and influenced by systems like Ruby's Event Machine or Python's Twisted."
"The code that makes up node.js is carried out by the V8 javascript engine. This engine (read: the component that processes javascript so that it can be understood by your operating system) [...]"
No need for insults, but should one take advice on programming languages and frameworks from someone explaining them in such terms? He assumes you don't know what a virtual machine is or how programs get executed (or how they interact with the OS), yet he tries to convince people with the benefits of decoupling threads from connections.
I wonder who's the audience for this. And I fear it's people who read articles at such a level and then think they are capable of making technical decisions. Kind of like Gartner, I guess.
It seems like the examples in the article (and even in this thread) are all basically proxies or chatbots. Are there better examples of successful applications of node.js?
That server uses YUI server-side to calculate JS module dependencies for that page's autocomplete feature. Since the response is very cacheable, and resolving dependencies doesn't happen on the client anymore, this technique improves loading time for that feature by 40%.
It also delivers less code for modern browsers. Feature tests from the browser are sent in the request, which server-side YUI considers for eliminating code only needed by older browsers.
Any idea what the break down is like on the loading time savings?
In other words, what portion of the loading time savings is attributable to download time vs parsing time vs execution time vs other things?
- Downloading and parsing metadata about modules YUI can load (eliminated)
- Calculating what files to download based on the metadata (moved to the server)
These tasks are usually started by the script loader inside of YUI's seed file, which is a small script that provides the loading API in the browser.
Instead of doing these two steps, the seed simply asks the server for what's needed and gets it back, near-instantly: it's likely in your browser cache, or a Yahoo! CDN edge cache primed from another visitor.
Most savings come from a combination of less code downloaded and cachability of the result. Slower browsers (old IE, mobile phones) also benefit from less execution time, because they are particularly slow at doing the loading themselves -- IE 6 users enjoy 60% faster feature startup after the switch to server-side loading.