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Comment by tghw | Hacker News Reader

Node, Backbone, CoffeeScript and MongoDB

What is your aversion to software written before 2011?

;-)

Thanks for this! Any chance you'd consider writing a full blog post later down the line about your experience with this stack?

I'm working on a node/backbone/mongdb (I don't grok coffeescript) app at the moment, and any real world apps and write ups just make my day : )

By the way, GREAT app, definitely had one of those "didn't know I wanted it 'til I saw it" moments watching the video.

We have several technical blog posts in the works talking about the stack, why we used it, and what we think so far.

Any reason you didn't use Socket.io? I noticed you're polling the server every few seconds for updates.

We do. Its hard to list every framework/library in there, so they're not all mentioned. Look for a future technical blog post that goes into more detail on what we used.

Trello does use Socket.io. If your browser supports websockets it will use them, but it will transparently fall back to polling if necessary.

I user Chrome 14 and updates take over 5 secs to be synced across different tabs. Some kind of a bug or the backend app polls the db regularly to push new messages ?

We're scaling back a little to handle the usage spike from the initial launch, so some users will get polling even if their browsers support websockets. As the load stabilizes, we'll be switching them back on and you should see performance improve quite a bit.

What are you using to 'minify' your HTML code?

I noticed that it's just 1 line.

We just strip out whitespace. Nothing fancy.

what framework(s) on the node side?

Express, Async, Mongoose, Redis, Socket.io, CoffeeScript, Less, and Underscore, off the top of my head. We also use Node Inspector during development; that's a great little tool.

Really awesome. I'm using the same libraries right now in my own app and struggling hugely with Backbone. Would love to see some of the posts someone referenced a few posts up to explain how you fit it all together.

I am a bit curious about it's performance characteristics (e.g. number of node.js instances launched, method of load balancing, etc). Do you experience any problems with GC?

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