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Comment by wubrr | Hacker News Reader

There are maaaany backends written in JavaScript (nodejs), TypeScript is a much better alternative, and this is a step in the right direction (though I'm personally not a fan of GraphQL).

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> There are maaaany backends written in JavaScript (nodejs)

Are there? I honestly don't know. I feel like it depends on how you count them. Are there JS/TS/nodejs "Backends For Frontends" (BFFs)? Yeah, I could see that, but then in that case there's at least as many other backends behind them, probably written in something else. Are there JS/TS/nodejs backends, mediating interaction with upstream databases in large enterprise organizations? I highly doubt it.

You are simply wrong. NodeJS is a popular server technology. I've implemented server APIs in NodeJS (both with and without GraphQL) in everything from large, well-known enterprises to brand new startups.

I could be wrong. That's one thing I'm trying to figure out. Setting that aside, like I said I don't really know that community, being mostly a Java developer. What're the go to database libraries? Is it sequelize, or something else?

There are tons of DB drivers/libraries for node. I'm personally a huge fan of slonik.

sequelize seems to be much more popular than slonik. Is sequelize more or less the standard or at least market leader?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=S...

Sequelize is primarily an ORM. I won't get into a religious debate, but there are many good reasons for not wanting to use an ORM.

Slonik is much newer, and is Postgres only. But there is a general trend seen in many different projects that support safe SQL execution using tagged template literals in JavaScript, which is a fantastic technology. Slonik was one of the first projects that went this route, but there are now many others.

In general I think it's a mistake to look for a single "market leader" for node DB access. There are many high quality libraries that are favored by different teams for various reasons.

I'm just trying to get a sense of what tools are most commonly used.

Of course, Hibernate (Java) dwarfs them all.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=S...

After a year-long job search, my sense was that (at least among hiring companies), TS was one of the most popular technologies and that was with a bias towards JVM-languages in my search.

In San Francisco, currently Indeed has ~2600 jobs for "Java", ~600 for "Typescript".

When I think “robust, performant language to serve traffic at scale,” my first instinct is definitely a frontend language.

I despise NodeJS and its entire ecosystem. The number of incidents I’ve been dragged into which are directly linked to its use is too damn high.

> I highly doubt it.

Not sure why you highly doubt it, when you admit 'I honestly don't know' and the truth is 20 seconds of googling away.

backend web frameworks - https://github.com/vanodevium/node-framework-stars

ORMs - https://github.com/emanuelcasco/typescript-orm-benchmark

Not to mention pretty much every major cloud service (AWS, GCP, etc) has first-class JavaScript/TypeScript SDKs.

I highly doubt it because I was talking about enterprise companies. I honestly have no idea how common node is in general, including other organizations, but when it comes to enterprise companies, I do have an idea. My idea is that node isn't very common. I'm even more confident in relative terms: however common it is, it's less common than Java and .Net are.

As for cloud service SDKs, are you saying that many node backends rely on cloud SDKs?

What's an 'enterprise company' lol? Many big banks have hundreds, if not thousands of nodejs-based backend services. Is Netflix[0] an 'enterprise company'? What about Walmart[1] ?

[0] https://www.bellcorpstudio.com/blog/how-netflix-is-using-nod... [1] https://medium.com/walmartglobaltech/migrating-large-enterpr...

> As for cloud service SDKs, are you saying that many node backends rely on cloud SDKs?

Almost anything that uses a cloud service like DynamoDB is going to 'rely on cloud SDKs'... the language is irrelevant.

Incidentally, I see no evidence in those links or elsewhere that either Walmart or Netflix is using node to meditate interactions with upstream data sources. What I do see elsewhere is the usual suspects: some databases and message queues, and then lots of Java

https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/ep76-netflixs-tech-stack

An enterprise company is a large company that's not a tech company: banks, health care, finance, manufacturing, retail, etc. The proverbial "FAANG" companies are not enterprise.

Netflix is not enterprise. Walmart is.

As for DynamoDB, is that database more common, or less common, than relational databases like Oracle and MSSQL?

That's a cool definition of 'enterprise company' you got there.

Maybe google 'enterprise company' after you finish googling which database is more common.

Ok. How do you recommend I go about Googling it, and what do you predict will be the results?

> which database is more common.

SQLite is #1 by far, with MySQL a distant second.

Not in enterprise companies, it's not.

I've mainly worked in startups, but also worked with big enterprises as well during a stint at Red Hat, and yes, backends in Javascript are numerous and plentiful. Aside from Java in enterprise environments, it's by far the most common backend I've seen.

I'm curious about that ecosystem, especially with regard to databased. I asked this elsewhere, but what're the main libraries for database access?

For databases it varies quite a bit. Among people who like to use an ORM, TypeORM is the current thing that is in widespread use. For non-ORM people, most use pg or a similar thin-layer on top of raw SQL.

In enterprise it was a lot of raw SQL as well, in large part because there was a lot of different DBs to support from db2 to SQL Server to Postgres

It's dodgy finding the right search term, but at first blush it looks like sequelize is most popular, though the gap has narrowed considerably.

They fall under a few buckets: Driver:

- node-postgres

- node-mysql2

Query Builder / Other thin clients: - knex - kysely - slonik ORM: - TypeORM - MikroORM - Objection.js - DrizzleORM - Prisma (actually runs a separate binary)

Notion (valuation 10 G$) and Asana (market cap 5 G$) are both nodejs down to the DB layer, to name two codebases I have personal experience with.

Not quite Fortune 500 tier, but certainly not small potatoes.

Well, I'm pretty sure I didn't say that nobody wrote node backends.

Yes, node/TS backend APIs are extremely common.

Are they more common, or less common, than Django and RoR?

LMGTFY

Did you forget the link?

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