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Comment by ryanfitz | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested in dnode you should also check out hook.io https://github.com/hookio/hook.io

It uses dnode to essentially let you build an auto-discovering message bus. I recently started using it and so far its been an amazing way to build up small independent services. With almost zero configuration the services can boot up and start talking to each other. It even works in the browser.

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So I have been playing with Hook.io for a while too. It is pretty cool, but it should also be pointed out that it is still in early stage development.

Reading the mailing list you can see that hook.io still has some issues to work through: http://groups.google.com/group/hookio

It's not clear to me what this offers exactly beyond events, which are easy enough in socket.io. And dnode allows very free-style form of RPC where you can have an event/call pass a function that then can be called from the other side.

What is it that makes hook.io exciting?

hook.io isn't about client server communication. It's about seamless mesh communication with high fault tolerance. The browser is just another end point.

I don't quite understand this from the documentation I'm reading. Doesn't high fault tolerance require automatic failover of some sort that goes beyond broadcasting the messages to all Hooks? For instance, if you want to send an SMS robustly are you supposed to have multiple SMS listeners? And if so, how do you avoid sending multiple messages without some sort of ACK or message queue?

Holy moly. That is super cool. I'm still a little unsure of NodeJS as a platform, but the level of innovation in the ecosystem is incredible, very modular and very composable. Impressive stuff.

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