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Personally, I'd say that the front-end tooling ecosystem constitutes the "killer app": - Minification: Uglify - Transpilation: Babel/TypeScript/CoffeeScript

Personally, I'd say that the front-end tooling ecosystem constitutes the "killer app": - Minification: Uglify - Transpilation: Babel/TypeScript/CoffeeScript - JS Module Systems: Require/Browserify/Webpack/JSPM - CSS preprocessors: Less/Sass/Stylus - Linting: JSHint/ESLint/CSSLint If you're using a lot of front-end tools, you're using Node. And if you're using Node, you might as well use it to write your APIs.

audessuscest 11y ago
That's not true for a simple reason : Many people who use these front-end tools, still use PHP to build website (like I do)
- joshuacc 11y ago
  Sure. And lots of people that use Rails still use it to communicate with Java-based backend systems. That doesn't mean that Rails isn't Ruby's "killer app."
  - audessuscest 11y ago
    Sorry i wasn't clear. I don't deny these front tools are node's killer app (they obviously are). I deny it is enough to make node replace php.
BrianDGLS 11y ago
I agree. At this time Javascript's biggest strength is build tools. It may not be as mature as PHP on the server, but there is so much community growth that I don't think it will be long catching up.
- delta9 11y ago
  It's like saying PHP as a great community, we will catching up JAVA soon.. non sense, as the topic said, I want to use node if there are some killer app that I want to use, like the one I know in other languages. Do you know any like drupal for example (multilingual, workflow, content management system, and more) ?
- Daishiman 11y ago
  On the contrary. The fact that there's at least 4 "mainstream" build tools and their popularity changes every 6 months is a sign of an ecosystem with little stability that is no good to build a solid foundation. On Ruby and Python land, how long has it been since RoR and Django have been the dominant players?
mtberatwork 11y ago
> And if you're using Node, you might as well use it to write your APIs. No, not when I have access to all kinds of other languages, frameworks, libraries, etc to choose from on the server side.
aikah 11y ago
These are not apps. And none of these are meant to run on a server like Wordpress. If you run less or babel compiler on production servers to serve CSS or JS well , you're not a serious developer. Cloud9 I guess would be a good example of a killer app ,but that's no CMS. The reason why there is no serious CMS with node is that nodejs development is extremely hard, because async programming is hard. No matter how much layers one puts on top of it (promises,generators...) you can't abstract async programming in nodejs. Look at Go, Go routines can be totally abstracted. IF I write that code: result := Object.DoNonBlocking() As a client of Object I don't have to know whether it is run concurrently, or not , or blocking or not. In node I have to know whether I returns a promise or a value , IE hump into the event loop or not. PHP has its share of problems though,just like Go, but their concurrency model(or lack of) make things way more easy. I can't imagine writing something such as Magento or Drupal in nodejs (with the exact same features). It would be just insane. A great challenge though.

audessuscest 11y ago

That's not true for a simple reason : Many people who use these front-end tools, still use PHP to build website (like I do)

joshuacc 11y ago
Sure. And lots of people that use Rails still use it to communicate with Java-based backend systems. That doesn't mean that Rails isn't Ruby's "killer app."
- audessuscest 11y ago
  Sorry i wasn't clear. I don't deny these front tools are node's killer app (they obviously are). I deny it is enough to make node replace php.

BrianDGLS 11y ago

I agree. At this time Javascript's biggest strength is build tools. It may not be as mature as PHP on the server, but there is so much community growth that I don't think it will be long catching up.

delta9 11y ago
It's like saying PHP as a great community, we will catching up JAVA soon.. non sense, as the topic said, I want to use node if there are some killer app that I want to use, like the one I know in other languages. Do you know any like drupal for example (multilingual, workflow, content management system, and more) ?
Daishiman 11y ago
On the contrary. The fact that there's at least 4 "mainstream" build tools and their popularity changes every 6 months is a sign of an ecosystem with little stability that is no good to build a solid foundation. On Ruby and Python land, how long has it been since RoR and Django have been the dominant players?

mtberatwork 11y ago

> And if you're using Node, you might as well use it to write your APIs. No, not when I have access to all kinds of other languages, frameworks, libraries, etc to choose from on the server side.

aikah 11y ago

These are not apps. And none of these are meant to run on a server like Wordpress. If you run less or babel compiler on production servers to serve CSS or JS well , you're not a serious developer. Cloud9 I guess would be a good example of a killer app ,but that's no CMS. The reason why there is no serious CMS with node is that nodejs development is extremely hard, because async programming is hard. No matter how much layers one puts on top of it (promises,generators...) you can't abstract async programming in nodejs. Look at Go, Go routines can be totally abstracted. IF I write that code: result := Object.DoNonBlocking() As a client of Object I don't have to know whether it is run concurrently, or not , or blocking or not. In node I have to know whether I returns a promise or a value , IE hump into the event loop or not. PHP has its share of problems though,just like Go, but their concurrency model(or lack of) make things way more easy. I can't imagine writing something such as Magento or Drupal in nodejs (with the exact same features). It would be just insane. A great challenge though.