DHdham·Mar 14, 2014
At my company(we are small just 2 devs), I decided to go down the Node route, because why not, the project I just got off of was a lot of client javascript(with Play framework) and it made sense. This was the end of 2011. I was looking for something to replace Play framework because the impending doom of Play 2.0(which ended up being terrible..for us).
We started writing stuff in Node using the node mysql, and ran into a few issues(https://github.com/felixge/node-mysql/issues/200), that were resolved really fast.
As I got into it more and writing more business logic it started to fall apart. The async nature really started to show it's face. The async library was awesome in helping with taming the callbacks . When you want to execute queries in series, iterate over data, manipulate the data coming in and then write some data to a csv
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, it's just not pretty.
The code looked good, and it was all in really small functions, but making sense of order of execution with callbacks flying all over the place proved difficult. It was possible definitely but if you looked at the logic in Java, it was just like a big sigh of relief. Not sure how to explain it but looking at code that executes like you think it would makes me happier.
Luckily we didn't have too many projects done in Node and switched to Rails 6 months after and have been happy ever sense. I've revisited Node a few times, but even with generators it makes certain things blah. Specifically looping through arrays that need to execute callback code.
I really, really want to like Node.JS, but it's just not there for me. For me both languages on the client and server is overrated anyway and with Angular I'm writing less Javascript then I ever have.