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Yes but with the caveat that what you can do is limited. The bitcoind rpc interface exposes blockchain information about your local wallet and addresses you ow

Yes but with the caveat that what you can do is limited. The bitcoind rpc interface exposes blockchain information about your local wallet and addresses you own only. So it is great for that. However, let's say you wanted to do something like have the user input their bitcoin address into an input and you returned the balance or a history of transactions from that address. You couldn't actually do that unless you also got and imported the user's private key (effectively giving you control of it). blockchain.info and similar services use custom code to do that stuff.

kylebrown 13y ago
The node/js implementations provide a stream interface to bitcoin, for watching transactions live and doing real-time updates. Its very difficult to do that with the bitcoind API because it is only polling functions. Whereas push/event-based handlers and filters are natural on a node implementation (eg watch all new transactions for a particular bitcoin address, how to do that using bitcoind, without long polling?).