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Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

Since our stack involved MongoDB, it only made sense to live in a JS only environment.

I've never used MongoDB; can someone explain to me why this would seem like an advantage, and/or what it has to do with MongoDB?

Is the MongoDB API simply JavaScript?

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MongoDB has good drivers for Node (as for most other languages) but also a fully-featured ORM that can save time in these kind of projects: mongoosejs.com

MongoDB also ships with a JS runtime so you can run map/reduce calls written in JavaScript entirely DB-side, as well as other goodies.

So it's fair to say that the language that makes the most sense when using MongoDB is JavaScript, even if that wouldn't be enough IMHO to justify using Node for a project.

I never understood why you needed ORM for a database that stores objects... Validation is the only problem it helps in but there are other ways of doing that.

ORM for Mongo is silly....

It must not be that silly because 10gen hired the author of Mongoose ;-)

Mongodb is a json document store. I use it myself. It works very well with "node" because node of course uses javascript as its language.

But wouldn't it work as equally well with any other language that has a JSON library? With Node you still need to call a function to serialize an object to a JSON string or vice versa.

Not any other language. In JavaScript there is 1 function call to serialize and 1 function call to deserialize. In Java it's much more complicated, for example.

Well in Java, if your JSON library doesn't have a single function to call for deserialize or serialize, it's either a poor library or you should be able to wrap the complicated part in a function that makes it a one-liner. The Jackson library for instance has ObjectMapper.readValue() and ObjectMapper.writeValue() which are both one-liners.

My main point though is that writing in JavaScript doesn't naturally make it easier to work with JSON than any other language with similar functions to serialize/deserialize JSON.

I'm not a Java coder so I'll take your word on it about library support, I've only used the JSONObject, JSONArray, etc. classes. Surely you will concede that JSON being modeled after JavaScript gives the language a little bit of a leg up?

Not really. In theory, it's an advantage in that you can reuse the parser and avoid loading another, but in practice, that's only really important in the browser, not on the server, where the lib will be permanently loaded anyway.

And JSON values map 1:1 to native data structures in most languages - in fact, JSON can be parsed as Python code with the exception of the \/ escape.

It's not JSON, it's BSON. BSON supports more data types, which are needed for a proper database (such as object IDs, longs, doubles, binary data, references, etc.)

You still need a driver and a bson serializer if you use node.js.

Sure. But it's certainly easier than most other languages. It's not a great reason to switch for that, but working with Mongo is fairly trivial in Node.

I didn't understand that either. MongoDB works very well with many other languages; just recently I was using it with Python, and the driver and API work very well. I guess since MongoDB stores data in BSON, which is the binary version of JSON, the javascript object format, the author decided that JS is closest in spirit to Mongo.

The mongodb shell uses javascript, and stored functions and map/reduce functions and more all use javascript. So if you use mongodb, you'll be using quite a bit of javascript anyways.

A Document Based Store have several advantages over traditional for ex. relational stores ...

Mongo core is c++ and can be utilized from any lingo ...

It is schema less but can be desribed with a schema . it is named collections and on the fly add a tables or rows, no migrations downtime etc.

scary for some ...

Closing into what the oodb concept was setting goals prior ...

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